Today’s report is a combined report for Saturday and Sunday as I spent both days looking at Digital Printing and Web-2-Print software.

Digital printing is definitely a major theme at Drupa 2008. Every second aisle has a large format plotter spewing out a constant stream of Spiderman posters and maps of the world from poster-size to building-size. There are mono and colour copiers of varying speed and quality, digital web-fed presses and dozens of software companies offering web-to-print and content creation portals.

Improvements in speed, quality and reliability, coupled with a changing marketplace has many pundits predicting that digital printing will be the dominant printing technology within the next 10 or so years. This swing toward digital is driven by market changes such as ever shortening run lengths and the demand for personalised marketing. Digital technology opens up emerging markets like Books on Demand and Vanity printing offering printers an opportunity to expand and diversify.

I started at Canon. I was introduced to Anthony White who showed me the range of machines both mono and colour on display. Their flagship is the Imagepress C7000VP, which prints at 70 A4 pages per minute, can hold up to 10000 sheets, print on all types of paper from 50gsm to 300gsm and can fold and stitch or perfect bind. They were printing a 48pp, A5, full colour, saddle-stitched book and the image quality was really good. They also have a higher quality press aimed at short run and proofing applications – the C1. The print quality on this machine was excellent and they even have a clear toner which creates a matt varnish effect. Each machine had its own RIP and Job queue with a range of options for colour management, setup, storage and reprinting. Cannon even have a module for interfacing with AGFA’s Apogee prepress system.

To bring orders into the digital pressroom, Canon offer a product called Digital StoreFront. Digital Store Front has PDF generation, template-based content creation, online job-tickets, shopping cart-style ordering and credit card payment options.

Next was HP where Rob West took me around the stand to look at their range of Indigo presses. HP uses a different technology to their competitors in that the indigo uses liquid ink rather than toner. This gives them some advantages in that they are able to extend the CMYK colour gamut by incorporating Orange and Violet in a special RIP akin to offset’s hexachrome. The print quality was excellent and their top of the range Indigo 7000 can produce 120 A4 pages per minute in full colour with a maximum image size of 317x464. It is fascinating to watch these machines print high quality colour images at speed when each image that comes out is different to the previous image. HP is also able to match Pantone colours using software akin to the ‘paint-mixing’ software at hardware stores. You can select a colour from any sample using an ‘eye-dropper’ or alternatively, key in a Pantone colour and the software will give you the ‘recipe’ for mixing the ink. Large volume colours can be produced by HP given a lead time of a few days (an eternity in the digital print world). Again all sorts of options are available including addition paper trays, reel-fed versions even offline UV varnish.

Finally I visited Colin McKenzie of Oce. Oce have some amazing equipment focused particularly on the publishing and mailing industries. Highlights of their stand were burst-bound books being printed, collated and bound in one pass at 6000 books per hour. This was achieved using a reel-fed Oce JetStream series printer, feeding into a slitter/cutter/collator (all pages of the book are printed 4 pages at a time before printing the next copy of the book) and then into a Muller Martini binder and trimmer. Another really good example Oce offered was a personalised children’s book. You typed in the Childs name and within 3 minutes you were presented with a perfect bound, full colour children’s book where Ella(my niece) was the main character(dressed in pink for girls, blue for boys) in the story…really effective and very cute!

I also looked at half a dozen or so web-based customer portals designed to capture new business and feed a digital pressroom. It can become a bit of a blur after a while but there were a couple that really stood out from the crowd.

iWay, developed in Israel and used by a few of the leading press manufacturers had a very clean intuitive interface and good tools for template-driven online content creation and job ordering.

Docuboxx had some terrific tools for creating content from scratch including positioning, resizing and rotating of images(thanks to smart use of its core platform – Adobe Indesign CS3 Server). It also handled variable data and digital asset management. The layout of this software made it really simple to use.

Another system which stood out for me was FloSuite. FloSuite is based upon Adobe’s Indesign server but also uses Microsoft’s DotNet platform to make the system extremely customisable. I was shown some really elegant examples of variable data printing where the customer could create a supermarket catalogue, personalised for each shop, by choosing a template product then uploading an excel spreadsheet with names, address, products and prices. There was a very comprehensive set of core functions plus the ability to program special functions.

There is so much going on in this field it is very difficult to process. I didn’t even get to cover Kodak or Xerox! In fact companies like Canon and Oce are offering expert help and consultancy in an effort to help conventional printers understand the opportunities and move into the digital market successfully.

Tomorrow I am spending the day with Heidelberg, including a visit to a local printing company. Until then….