For Position Only: Drupa Wants to Pump Printing Up
If you thought your feet got tired walking around Moscone Center during Seybold San Francisco, imagine a show that’s exponentially bigger: 10 times as many attendees, 5 times as many exhibitors — from 40 countries — spread out over 18 exhibit halls! It’s Drupa, the (gulp) 14-day-long print expo that’s taking place right now in Dusseldorf, Germany. I don’t know about you, but I’m glad to be sitting in my home-office looking at the roses in my backyard and reading the show news online. Now let me save you the trouble of even surfing the Web for Drupa news.
Because Drupa comes but once every four or five years, some of the biggest product releases in the industry occur at this show. Drupa, whose name derives from druck und papier (German for “printing and paper”), has become increasingly focused on digital printing and prepress over the years, and the first show of this millennium is no exception. More than ever, Drupa 2000 reflects tremendous strides in digital publishing, particularly when it comes to short-run, direct-imaging, and computer-to-plate printing.
Short-Run Printing
The biggest news in this arena is variable-data printing. Short-run presses have been around for several years, and although they’re becoming increasingly faster, they pretty much serve a niche market. As a result, few printers or prepress houses have offered the on-demand printing services with any runaway success. The component that’s been holding back the technology, some argue, is the capability to customize documents using variable-data software so that you essentially produce unique print runs of one.
At Drupa, the Print On Demand Initiative (PODi) is touting a new open standard for variable-data printing called Personalized Print Markup Language, or PPML. PPML is based on XML and provides a flexible way to handle objects on a page so that print (or online) documents can be customized for each individual recipient. Adobe, Barco, and EFI are just some of the companies demonstrating PPML-based on-demand printing at the show.
Plenty of new short-run presses capable of printing those one-to-one marketing pieces are also being introduced at Drupa. These include:
- The Xeikon DCP 32D and 50D, the company’s third-generation web-fed digital color presses, capable of producing 130 pages per minute. Xeikon also announced the CSP 320D, its first sheet-fed digital color press, capable of producing 960 letter-size full-color duplex impressions per hour;
- The Indigo Series 2 “ultra-high speed” Digital Offset Color presses. Indigo’s Series 2 line includes two sheet-fed models (UltraStream 2000 and UltraStream 4000) and two web models (Publisher 4000, Publisher 8000) for commercial printing, and three web presses for label printing (Omnius WebStream 100, Omnius WebStream 200, and Omnius WebStream 400). The new Series 2 line can be configured in single or multiple-engine architectures and each engine prints all four colors for better registration and greater productivity.
- The Scitex VersaMark Business Color Press, which the company bills as “the world’s highest-speed digital color press.” The VersaMark BCP, which starts at $1 million, can print 100 percent variable data in four colors while printing at more than 2,000 pages per minute, Scitex says.
- The 60-ppm Xerox DocuColor 2000, now available, and the Futurecolor digital press, which uses patented imaging technology to produce offset-lithographic-quality output and will be available “when [Xerox] expects demand to support the system’s high-production capacity.”
- The NexPress 2100 digital color press, co-developed by Heidelberg and Kodak, which will ship in 2001. The sheet-fed NexPress offers offset-like quality as well as digital press flexibility — 2,100 A3 pages an hour and a digital front end that supports variable data printing.
Computer-to-Plate
On the CTP (computer-to-plate) side, one of the new developments is violet laser imaging systems. Thermal imaging — in which the heat of a laser causes dots to image on a plate — was born at Drupa 95 and has flourished in the last few years largely thanks to Creo Products and Heidelberg, which have put a few hundred thermal platesetters in the market. But violet laser diodes are the same kind used in DVD players, and CTP devices that use them are just coming to market. The good news: They’re potentially much less expensive. Purup-Eskofot is showing a violet platesetter, the ImageMaker, that is an internal-drum device that images 30 plates per hour at 2,540 dpi.
A wide variety of other CTP developments are also being demonstrated at Drupa, including:
- BasysPrint’s UV-Setters, platesetters that image conventional UV plates using a “micromirror” chip;
- Agfa’s LiteSpeed plate technology (still under development), which involves a chemical coating on a aluminum plate that is digitally imaged directly at the printing press, thus making it unnecessary to develop the plate;
- Multiple processless plates from Agfa, Asahi, Presstek, and others.
And somewhere amidst the digital presses and digital platesetters are assorted thermal and on-press imaging systems, such as MAN Roland’s short-run DICOweb press, which images dots directly onto cylinders and automatically erases them after printing; Komori’s Project D Press, still a “concept machine,” which marries CreoScitex’s digital imaging technology with a 40-inch (8-up) offset press; and direct-imaging presses from Sakurai Graphic Systems (the Oliver-474EPII) and Adast (the PAX DI).
These announcements are only the beginning. Proofers, workflow tools, digital cameras, and more also abound at Drupa, and they’re particularly exciting in a world that’s increasingly driven by dot-coms. Innovations such as these drive down the cost of production, speed the time to delivery, and ultimately give creative professionals greater freedom to do what they do best — design pieces that capture readers’ imaginations and engage their interest in fresh and inspiring ways.
More from Drupa next time.
This article was last modified on May 25, 2000
This article was first published on May 25, 2000
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