printgeek

printgeek has bought an Oyster card and is all geared up for this year's inaugural Total Print! Expo. If you know of anything particularly interesting or geeky going on at the show then printgeek wants to know about it, photograph it and blog it. To tip off printgeek, send an email to printgeek@printweek.com. 

This, my drupa friends, is Edward T Chrusciel. Nice as he is, we're not that interested - it's what he's holding that's of note.

Not the greatest of pictures, admittedly, but printgeek hadn't realised what esteemed company we were to enjoy. Because this is the Fuji Dimatix Samba print bar.

It's not on display anywhere at Drupa. It's locked away in a secret area that printgeek could tell you of, but would have to subsequently kill you.

This is the print unit on the Jet Press 720 on Fujifilm's stand. On the table to the bottom left you can see one of the elements of the bar. It consists of four print heads front to back - one for each colour CMYK. However, you could stick another print head behind this to add a spot colour or coating. It's shaped as a parallelogram rather than square for redundancy ie it ensures that a blocked or non-fired nozzle has a back up behind it to fire (and the Jet Press has a heap of other technology to monitor and respond to any failures). And the print heads are the Dimatix printhead-on-a-chip printheads. No circuitry on show, just a ribbon back to the main board.

The print bar before you is the B1 format from the Jet Press 720. The Dimatix press release suggested it could be scaled up to B1 format. But Chrusciel whispered in printgeek's ear that under testing conditions, arrays 70 inches wide were achieved - that's 2m.

Printgeek worried that a print bar this wide would frankly bend and distort the image being printed. But the casing for the print heads is a highly engineered ceramic (which won't bend).

On a side note - remember those first iPods that suffered from screens that scratched too easily? It was Fuji Dimatix that fixed Apple's problem, by printing a protective layer on the visible section of the screen with - you guessed it - inkjet.

While traipsing the aisles of Drupa one thing has come clear, when it comes to clever colour management tools, the colour space to remember isn’t RGB or CMYK but red white and blue.

Yup that’s right, in a totally unscientific and highly biased poll it seems clear to printgeek that us brits are some of the best at innovation in this area.

This morning printgeek came across Centurax’s clever and inexpensive Sprint spectrophotometer. This super simple device, which looks like a computer mouse, is an ingenious scanning spectrophotometer – that is you trundle it over a test strip and it’s clever enough to find and measure the patches without the RSI-inducing multiple measurements of a handheld device or the wallet emptying required for the more automated measuring machines.

As colour control becomes more critical with the adoption of ISO 12647 there’s only going to be more need to make these measurements, so making it affordable and easy to do is an important step.

And speaking of ISO 12647, there are two other Brits stealing a march in the market for tools to help hit and stick to that target. It’s testament to our native inventiveness that Alan Dresch of Mellow Colour, who started out as a lone voice on this topic before the last Drupa is here with his PrintSpec products, as is the more recent entrant to the market Bodoni Systems with its PressSign series.

Printgeek wishes all three of our colour control compatriots best of British.

 Maybe you’re sick of hearing about it, but printgeek couldn’t wait to get a peek at Fuji’s Jet Press 720 as soon as I got to the show.

Seeing it and hearing more in-depth about the product only makes it more impressive. Initial thoughts on it being based on a B2 offset press was that the form was designed to make it more comfortable for printers to contemplate, but the use of the feed and delivery of a press provides the clear benefits of side lays for precise sheet to sheet register so the output can sail through existing post-press set ups. Fujifilm UK’s Keith Dalton says that feature alone has had UK printers chomping at the bit to get on the beta test programme.

Fuji won’t say whose press it’s based on but at a glance at least there’s a strong resemblance to a Ryobi.

Fuji’s claim that the machine beats offset on cost and turnaround time for runs below 2,000, and is competitive up to 5,000 makes it a really compelling product for a great number of printers looking for a tool to tackle short runs on bigger sheets than are currently possible. The downsides are that in these days of one-pass productivity the machine can only print one side of the sheet, so needs to passes to complete a double-sided job.

Having  stolen a march on its competitors be pre-announcing the Jet Press 720 before the show opened Fuji has made it one of the must-sees of the show. But giving it a run for its money is Screen’s B2 inkjet challenger, the Truepress Jet SX, unveiled on the first day of the show. For anyone whose interest has been aroused by the potential of B2 inkjet the good news is that the two companies’ stands are opposite each other in hall 8b and the presses are situated only yards from each other making a head to head comparison a comparative breeze.

So far the printers printgeek has spoken to about the machine were really interested in the concept, but one reinforced the oft heard cry that it was all very well but it was no longer the presses that held up his adoption of personalisation but post-press. What he wanted wasn’t inkjet in an offset press but the possibility of personalising finished products after the post-press process.

 Xerox has revealed the extent of its exploits in inkjet R&D while challenging pretty current orthodox of inkjet technology.

The vice president of the Xerox Research Centre, Webster, Steve Hoover described what he called the inkjet paradox, that is when jetting the ink the need for fine nozzles means you need a very thin watery fluid, that would get clogged by the thick "toothpaste like" inks used in offset and flexo print today but watery inks cause all sorts of problems with degraded image quality and drying when they hit the substrate.

Webster claims Xerox has the answer, in fact it has had it for 20 years - solid inks as used in its office products. It's a simple way to solve the viscosity problem - when hot the inks are melted and thin, so if you keep them and the print head hot they meet the requirements for jetting, but once they leave the warm confines of the print head they rapidly cool to the preferred gloopiness needed to stick where they're sprayed on the substrate.

Hoover says that for commercial and industrial applications Xerox has gone a step further and developed what it terms a gel ink. The stuff it has in the lab is also UV cured to make it extra tough.

It's a compelling concept not just for commercial print but also for packaging which has a need for that robustness. And co-incidentally is also what Xerox chief executive Anne Mulcahy has identified as the next big opportunity for the firm. A focus on packaging would explain why the firm was keen to highlight its success in the lab of printing onto a wide range of substrates beyond paper including plastic and metal films.

The firm has a 508mm (20") four-colour 133m per minute machine as a test bed for the technology, but won't be drawn on a timeframe for when it will be launched. Given it says the fundamental R&D and patent work is done and it's happy to play its hand it shouldn't be too long. Xerox has made much of the fact that rivals are unveiling products that won't see the light for a year or two, it could be that it is making cash from its concept at about the same time other suppliers get around to shipping what are already being pushed as products.

In the meantime Mulcahy also dropped heavy hints that solid ink will carry on its march up the productivity and performance path and could see the light of day in the production space soon. Having cast aspersions on whether this Drupa should really be defined as the inkjet show it's clear that it won't be too long until Xerox is also supplying inkjet kit, however unlike some other firms it is being more guarded about its applications. It has stated that inkjet has its place in print but that it falls short of being a panacea.

The team at PrintWeek will be furiously busy at this year's Drupa, so you'll have a tough time grabbing their time as they wander the halls. Your best bet is to head straight to the PrintWeek stand.

PrintWeek is located at the Haymarket Print group stand in Hall 7, C01.

Here's the floor plan.

Printgeek will be out and about at Drupa this year, bringing you exclusive behind-the-scenes material of what's hot at the show, where printgeek has been and what printgeek has seen. Check back regularly to see what's new, and email any tips to printgeek@printweek.com.

Printgeek thanks you for your interest and looks forward to seeing you at Drupa.