The equipment is ready to go, the market is prepped, but we’re still waiting for hard and fast data on costs.
I have been predicting that inkjet will be the next big thing. However, paper manufacturers are not seeing any appreciable uptick in inkjet paper volume. So let's take a little history lesson. Lithography was discovered in 1798 and offset lithography around 1900 or so. It hit the mainstream around 1970. Within a decade, it completely replaced letterpress. Offset litho was waiting for an improved pre-press workflow and that came with the invention of photographic typesetting.
Chester Carlson discovered electrophotography in the 1930s and the first copier came into use in the 1960s. Toner-based digital printing was introduced in the late 1970s when Xerox and IBM showed black-only sheetfed (Xerox) and roll-fed (IBM) printers. Within five years, transaction printing was mostly digital.
In 1993, Indigo and Xeikon introduced digital colour printing. Soon Canon and Xerox entered the market. Digital colour started to take a bite out of offset litho. The first desktop printers were introduced in the 1980s and they now number in the billions. Wide-format full-colour inkjet was first shown in the 1990s and it has done very well. Growth in wide-format inkjet is worldwide (if only to print "Going out of business" and "Foreclosure" signs).
Today, 10-15% of all printing is digital. Sheetfed is mostly toner in both monochrome and colour. In roll-fed, many of the monochrome printers will be replaced with roll-fed colour printers. A few will use toner, but most will use inkjet. The Kodak Versamark has displaced monochrome toner printers, but the real growth will come as more roll-fed inkjet printers come online. This will begin with commercial installations of HP's T300 and Kodak Prosper presses now coming online around the world.
Wide-format is virtually all inkjet. The market is divided into aqueous, solvent (and eco-solvent) and UV for both roll-fed and flatbed versions. In this market, more than 100 substrates are used from plain paper to canvas to vinyl to cloth to plastics to glass and wood and metal.
Inkjet and toner printing have an advantage over offset because there is no makeready. Inkjet can achieve quality levels close to continuous tone and support multiple ink sets. We should mention that HP Indigo printers can also do this but are constrained by sheet size and image area.
Inkjet is almost all ink and heads and both are consumable. The other day I bought ink for my desktop HP 450. I paid almost $60 for two small boxes that fit in my pocket. I think the ink costs more than champagne. Potential users of production inkjet want to see some real numbers on ink and head cost.
Then there is the paper. I have no idea what plain paper is anymore because paper is pulp and chemicals and water and, in some cases, coatings. The HP T300 web inkjet press puts a drop of liquid coating down before they deposit a drop of ink. Although the paper is not "plain," it is less expensive than many so-called "digital papers."
Thus, we are waiting for a new breed of inkjet printer to compete in the current sheetfed space. We are waiting to see how much it will cost. We are waiting to see what the paper will be like. And when they all come into harmony, we will know when inkjet will take off.
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