Océ’s Mal Baboyian talks about the company’s move into inkjet printing

There’s nothing like a talking at length with an industry exec to get a better understanding of how a company thinks. And it’s especially important when a company is leveraging its legacy to adopt a new technology. Consider high-speed inkjet printing, one of the hottest topics in the industry today. Most major equipment vendors have significant programs for development and marketing inkjet machines that have the versatility and print quality to be compelling replacements for electrophotographic systems and even begin to intrude into the realm of offset presses. Océ has been one of the most aggressive in bringing new inkjet presses to market. It’s JetStream family posits a significant shift for the company which is an established player in continuous-feed toner systems. This makes me kind of curious, so I called Mal Baboyian, president of the company’s production printing systems division in Boca Raton, Florida to get the story straight from the top. We wound up talking for a long time and in this extensive, multi-part interview, Baboyian explained Océ’s vision for the market and shared what the company will have at PRINT 09. Watch for this interview to unfold here on Digital Nirvana over several days.
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On June 8 the Governor of California announced that the state would no longer purchase K -12 textbooks. On June 10, Adam Dewitz started a thread at Print Ceo Blog that has attracted 21 responses as of Sunday morning, June 14 . Clearly this is an interesting topic in our print centric world.

While many reactions will be more End of Print blabla, I would like to share a path that allows printers to benefit from the deep troubles in the textbook industry.

On the most theoretical level, the idea is to connect Print to Video to create a possibly new communication media. As a robust global distribute and print network becomes operational, there will be the scale to make this media channel interesting to global marketers.

When I was teaching at design school, they always told me it was better to show than to tell. So in that spirit, I ask you to consider the following clickable postcard. The same principle works for clickable A4s, printed in MFPs in school districts and clickable posters, signage and packaging, which are already being used extensively in Asia.

The Front of the Postcard

GOP Activist Makes Controversial Remarks:
Written by Robin Hinson
Saturday, 13 June 2009 22:48

Friday’s gorilla escape at Riverbanks Zoo prompted a prominent Republican to make some controversial remarks about First Lady Michelle Obama.

In an article posted on the website, www.fitsnews.com, Rusty Depass, a former chair of the State Election Commission, commented on the gorilla escape on www.facebook.com.

The post says quote, “I’m sure it (referring to the ape), is just one of Michelle’s ancestors…probably harmless.”

ABC Columbia News attempted to contact Depass, but he did not return our phone calls.

The Back of the Postcard

http://tinyurl.com/qgfwe

created at QR code generator

The video

There are more examples of how this could work at my blog at Clickable Print + Printernet Publishing.

It has almost been a year since drupa 2008 – the inkjet drupa – where we saw a handful of new inkjet-based digital presses announced from FujiFilm to Kodak to RR Donnelley to Océ and others.

Howie Fenton of NAPL has penned an article on state of digital printing technology and the impact they will have on the print-on-demand market.
The State of On-demand Printing from NAPL (PDF Download).

Guy Broadhurst of Océ talks about JetStream technology and applications at On Demand 2009

Is digital printing a production technology? Or a marketing strategy? “Digital Printing: Transforming Business and Marketing Models,” part of Heidi Tolliver-Nigro’s Marketer’s Primer Series, argues for the latter. It presents digital production not as technology in the domain of print buyers and production managers but as the foundation of a comprehensive strategy for changing the way marketers look at document management and marketing.

This report is broken down into five sections.

Section 1: What digital printing is, along with its benefits and drawbacks from a marketing perspective. Examines traditional “sticking points,” including binding and finishing and the availability of substrates. How these characteristics drive key marketing applications.

Section 2: A closer look at each of these applications. Each discussion includes a series of short case studies in each of eight marketing classifications that provide key insights into how these applications are used in the real world.

Section 3: New ways of evaluating cost critical to digital printing success, including cost per piece, cost per lead, and ROI. Hypotheticals are used to drive the points home.

Section 4: Five “critical success factors” that enable marketers to take maximum advantage of digital printing technology. Includes key insights into helping marketers choose the right service provider.

Section 5: Final conclusions and additional resources as a next step.

The goal of the report is for marketers to be left with the understanding that the importance of digital printing has nothing to do with the technology—its costs, its output capabilities, or the applications it can produce, although many of them are discussed. It’s about transforming how they think about marketing.

The important thing is not digital printing technology itself, but the way it can be combined with other technologies (particularly databases, email, wireless, and the Internet) to create broader solutions that make a real difference in how business market their products, as well as how they communicate with customers on a short-term and long-term basis and present their brands.

The information is presented both from the perspective of small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs), as well as large corporate marketers.

Single-user versions of the report can be purchased from the What They Think store, as well as from the Digital Printing Reports website. Licensed versions for internal and external distribution can be purchased from Research and Markets and Market Research, as well as from the Digital Printing Reports website.

“Digital Printing: Transforming Business and Marketing Models” is part of Heidi Tolliver-Nigro’s Marketer’s Primer Series, which also includes “1:1 (Personalized) Printing: Boosting Profits Through Relevance” and “Web-to-Print: Transforming Document Management and Marketing Models.” All three primers are designed both as authoritative primers for marketers and as internal training tools for printers.

HP, InfoPrint Solutions Company, Kodak´s Graphic Communications Group, and Oce N.V have created an alliance to support inkjet recyclability research. The alliance formed as Digital Print De-inking Alliance (DPDA) will jointly sponsor research on the recyclability of inkjet-printed paper.

With the recent announcements of high-volume production inkjet presses at drupa, many within the industry have expressed concerns over the recyclability of applications printed on these new systems.

According to the announcement release by the DPDA, “Many paper recyclers are successfully using digitally printed papers in their process today, but there is a need for industry standards worldwide, as well as a need for test methods to compare recycling efficiency between different print technologies and recycling processes. The DPDA was founded to sponsor focused, objective research to identify printer, paper, or chemical additive solutions (or a combination thereof), ensuring de-inking/recycling approaches that are cost-effective and practical and that enhance industry sustainability practices. The DPDA is committed to actively engaging all relevant parties: paper manufacturers, paper recyclers, de-inking chemical and equipment manufacturers, and researchers, worldwide.”

The Print Industries Market Information and Research Organization (PRIMIR) has released their 2006 study that examined growth trends and forecasts for ink jet technology through 2011:

The PRIMIR study provides a thorough analysis and review of the status of inkjet technology, covering thermal, Piezo and continuous inkjet and their usage and adoption in display signage, graphic arts, packaging, manufacturing / deposition and decorative/textile markets.

With the recent drupa being dubbed, among other things, ‘the inkjet drupa,’ it would seem that inkjet has finally come into the mainstream in the printing industry. I.T. Strategies noted in the study that while the biggest market for inkjet technology is clearly display signage, over the course of the study timeframe (2006-2011), inkjet systems will be developed with the intent of challenging both electrophotography and analog print technologies. In the graphic arts market, production inkjet is at a very early stage with one-third of the production print volume being transaction oriented.

The study was exclusively available to PRIMIR members in 2007, but is now available to all parties for purchase through the WhatTheyThink Store.

A new book by Frank Romano provides a comprehensive introduction to anyone to understand inkjet technology and its application. The books eight chapters cover:

• The History of Inkjet Printing
• The Component Era
• The Wide-Format Era
• Inkjet Printing Technology
• Industrial Printing
• Packaging Printing
• Transaction and Transpromo Printing
• Drivers and Trends

“Inkjet is not hype,” Romano says. “It deserves to be taken seriously, and those who are serious about their future in printing and graphic arts should pay attention.”

Inkjet! History, Technology, Markets, and Applications is available through PIA/GATF Press and can be ordered online at www.gain.net, or by phone (toll-free 866-855-4283)

drupa 2008 has been called the “Inkjet Drupa” with many vendors demonstrating new Inkjet presses. The popularity for Inkjet-based printing systems comes from its substrate flexibility and speed that can’t currently be matched by toner-based counterparts. But at what cost do these new systems come? In the drupa halls and on industry Websites there has been a lot of discussion of the recyclability of papers that have been printed with inkjet.

On the Print CEO Blog Axel Fischer of the International Association of the Deinking Industry (INGEDE) states:

It is “a lot easier to recycle paper” – yes, if it has been printed with offset or gravure or dry toner. But not if it has been printed with current inkjet. This is the discrepancy at this year’s drupa: Green and inkjet are the main topics, but they do not match. Waterbased does not necessarily mean environmentally friendly. Because many waterbased inks cannot be recycled.

This is especially true for inkjet inks, no matter whether they are dyes or toners. They are not only unrecyclable for new graphic paper – even in small amounts, inkjet printed papers can spoil a load of recovered paper dedicated to be recycled for new newsprint or office papers. The current inkjet inks dissolve in the process water and dye it like a red sock (or here black sock) in the white wash. There it is the underwear that turns pink, here the fibers that turn so dark that the paper screened out of this broth will not meet any brightness specification any more.

Noel Ward of WhatTheyThink.com, responding to comments regarding to comments on inkjet recyclability states:

I keep hearing about the poor recyclability of IJ and no one except paper companies really want to talk about it. I’m in the process of digging into this to find out more of the dirty details, and I have also had the experience that when mentioning recycling to IJ engine vendors they redirect the topic. What I know so far is that IJ papers can be recycled, but not to produce most of us would call good quality printing papers. That may be okay for now, but not when thousands of miles of continuous feed IJ paper is being streamed off these new presses.

After the drupa dust settles, we will hopefully hear more about the recyclability of inkjet printed paper from the vendors that are bringing this technology to market.