Black & White: Digital Profitmaker

Color may have been print's shining star for the last decade but black-and-white imaging is still a solid profitmaker in the world of high-speed digital production of financial and security documents, booklets, direct mail, scientific and technical manuals, business forms, and other essential business products.

CAP Ventures, a market research consultancy in Norwell, Mass., estimates that the monochrome print-on-demand market is growing by 20% per year and will reach $6 billion in 2005. The Seybold Report, Vol. 1, No. 2, projects that monochrome costs will decline from six cents per impression in 2000 to four cents in 2005.

Monochrome systems with the highest speeds—output rates of 90 pages or more per minute (ppm)—are referred to as Segment 6. Printers in this category usually have additional features, such as roll infeed, multiple stock selection, and in-line finishing capabilities.

Last fall, a slew of new monochrome printers in Segment 6 came to market.

Delphax Technologies Inc. (until last month known as Check Technology Corporation) offers two new lines of high-volume, digital monochrome printers. The cut-sheet IM Series, which includes the Imaggia II introduced at the Print 01 show in September, offers rates of 220 or 300 pages per minute and is designed for producing financial printing, personalized direct mail, and business forms. The CR Series, consisting of continuous-feed machines that can produce 900 or 1,300 ppm, is intended for publishing and transaction-processing applications.

Both lines, says Jay Herman, president and chief executive of Delphax, offer high-quality imaging at industry-leading speeds by using a proprietary print engine technology called electron beam imaging (EBI). EBI, the company contends, is ideal for high-volume print runs of sequential numbers and/or variable information on a wide variety of paper substrates.

During Print 01, the company revealed an $11.5 million equipment contract with the John H. Harland Company, Atlanta, for check production.

In December, Check Technology announced that it had purchased the North American assets of Delphax Systems from Xerox Corporation. Delphax develops, manufactures, and distributes print engines, print management software, and digital printing systems incorporating its own EBI technology. Delphax also supplies the advanced high-speed Gemini print engine that drives Check Technology's Imaggia digital document production system.

Introduced recently for the Imaggia system is a 26" collator option, allowing for A2 (approximately 17x24") or four-up 81/2x11" forms.

The Digimaster 9110 from Heidelberg, introduced in 1999, today has an installed base of about 3,000 units, 60% of which are located in the United States, with most of the remainder in western Europe.

Half of the installations are in central reproduction departments; commercial printers account for 23%, in-plant operations 15%, and quick printers 12%.

Heidelberg distributes the product through a multichannel system involving several partners; Canon sells the system as the ImageRunner 110, IBM offers it as the Infoprint 2000, and Danka Business Systems sells the unit as the Heidelberg Digimaster 9110.

The machine, which utilizes ultra-small developer particles to attain sharp reproduction, is rated at 110 impressions per minute in simplex, duplex, stack, insert, and staple modes. An industry-first technology, vacuum corrugated feed, enables reliable feeding of very heavy papers, says Heidelberg.

The 9110 is called a network imaging system because it accepts jobs from a CD, floppy disk, or scanned from hard copy, or by way of the Internet or a company's intranet.

At Print 01, Heidelberg showed a feeding device from Roll Systems Corporation that allows the 9110 to utilize 65,000 sheets per paper roll without reloading. Also, this year Heidelberg plans to offer a high-speed, in-line hole-punching device for the unit.

"We're looking at the product systematically, not just at its speed but at finishing and how we can make the system much more productive," says Mark Weber, executive vice president in charge of solution and channel management for Heidelberg Digital. "We'll look at higher speeds later this year."

Already, commercial printers are taking notice of high-speed, black-and-white imaging as a new revenue stream. Says Weber, "They have jobs that require variable data and brochures that need to be updated. A high-volume monochrome printer makes sense." At Print 01, attended mainly by commercial printers, Heidelberg booked orders for more than 40 Digimaster 9110 systems.

A second growth area, he adds, are central reproduction departments and the facilities management firms that run the printing and copying departments for large corporations and charge by the page. Such services have become attractive because corporations don't need to own the assets or employ the workers.

In September IBM introduced the Infoprint 4100 cut-sheet printer, which can be configured for either high-quality or high-speed productivity. The unit accommodates paper 191/2" wide, allowing production of three 6x9" booklet pages across a single sheet.

The 4100 can image up to 762 letter-size or 718 A4 impressions per minute (ipm) in two-up duplex, or 1,400 6x9 ipm in three-up duplex, with resolution of 480/600 dots per inch (dpi).

"About 70% of Infoprint installations are in commercial print shops and industry/service bureaus, and the machine's biggest output category is books, just about 2.5 million around the world each month," says Bruce Otte, IBM's worldwide manager of production print solutions and strategy and marketing. "Schoolbooks and scientific and technical manuals make up the biggest markets."

As run lengths drop, Otte explains, commercial printers need to migrate to digital because offset presses are expensive and labor intensive. Also, by being able to print jobs more economically, the printers can gain access to new markets.

Otte concludes, "The commercial book market is a great application for the 4100 because publishers don't know which titles will sell. We totally redesigned the system with a new platform, increasing the web width and keeping the high quality."

Last fall, Océ Printing Systems USA introduced the DemandStream 8090cx, the first in a family of high-performance yet versatile printers.

Operators can choose either text quality or 600-dpi image quality, depending on job requirements. When producing books or manuals, the 8090cx can run 600-dpi data streams at 243 feet per minute (fpm), or 1,062 ipm, using 300-dpi consumables. For jobs containing graphics, finer 600-dpi toner is available to support speeds up to 170 fpm, or 744 ipm.

Additional features include an exclusive quick-change developer station and Prisma architecture, which handles a variety of incoming data streams such as PostScript, PDF, PDL, or TIFF, and allows adding news capabilities like archiving, auditing, and soft proofing.

In June Océ debuted the DPS 400 document printing system, rated at 101 ppm and designed for use by in-house reproduction departments or quick print shops. By year-end, Océ hopes to have 3,000 units in operation worldwide.

"This is a unique product that produces a black offset feel," says Océ's Steve Jarvis, director of product marketing. "It can be used for variable-data carbonless data, legislation items, booklets, or inserting. Also, color covers and photos can be inserted in line."

Key features include intuitive preprogramming, concurrent processing of analog or digital jobs, mailbox intelligent job management and storage, scan-ahead functionality for efficient job preparation, and scan-to-mailbox functionality to recall former jobs without rescanning or resetting.

Last year, Xerox Corporation introduced five DocuPrint models and a DocuTech unit.

The continuous-feed DocuPrint 350 CF, 700 CFD (consisting of two 350 engines working in tandem), and 1000 CFD (a second twin-engine configuration based on Xerox's 500 CF) digital printers feature exclusive intelligent print line manager control software. All are designed for high-speed production of publishing and transaction documents, such as booklets, invoices, and statements; the twin-engine units can print duplex.

The 500 CF printer, which has a recommended monthly volume of eight million impressions, can print simplex at up to 230 fpm, or 501 ipm. Operators can choose between 240- and 300-dpi resolution.

The DocuTech 90 and DocuPrint 90, cut-sheet printers rated at 90 ppm with 600-dpi output, both feature a high-capacity feeder that holds up to 5,100 sheets; subset offset (a variable-data run can be offset-stacked by content for easy insertion into a finishing unit); and proof interrupt and resume (momentary suspension of a production run to print a proof copy or high-priority job).

An optional Signature Bookletmaker for the DocuTech 90 allows production of brochures up to 11x17", with duplex printing, folding, stapling, and trimming.