How to Avoid Having a Lousy Press Event

Two recent trade shows, ON DEMAND and IPEX, are now behind us and as a printing industry market analyst I have been exposed to a lot of pre-show briefings and press conferences over the past couple of months (not to mention literally hundreds of such events over many years). Some have been good, but a surprising number have been terrible. Here are some of the major issues I’ve seen along with some suggestions for how they could be improved:

• Too short/too little information – I’ve been in on two recent press events where the presenters rushed through a 10 minute presentation, glossing over key details of some very big announcements, and then opened up for questions & answers. Remedy: If you are going to all of the effort of inviting press and analysts to this type of event, whether in person or on a conference call, you’ve got a captive audience. Take advantage of it! Journalists and analysts expect to sit for half an hour at least. Use the time well.
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Neryos Previews a 300-ppm, A3-Format, Cut-Sheet, Color Inkjet Printer

A new A3-format color inkjet printer was unveiled at IPEX by a French company called Neryos. I didn’t hear about it until I was back in the United States, so I made a point of setting up a call with Dominique Martin, the Neryos CEO, to talk about the IPN75, which the company boldly described in an IPEX preview showing as the “most productive sheet-fed colour inkjet printer ever.” The product is interesting in part because it shows how a company with systems integration experience can leverage a modular component like an inkjet head into a high-speed production color system.

Neryos IPN75

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Attendance at IPEX

There is no question that IPEX attendance was hurt by the travel problems associated with the Icelandic volcano. The real question is “How many people chose not to come because of it?” 5%? 10%? 25%? We’ll never know, but it definitely had a significant impact. Many people were delayed and many cancelled their trips entirely. And yet, it could have been much, much worse. The travel blackouts only lasted for a relatively small block of time. If it had been for three or four days the impact would have been devastating. With economic concerns still looming, particularly in the European Union with the Greek crisis, the last thing a trade show of the scale of IPEX needed was travel disruption brought on by an act of God. It makes exhibitors even more nervous than they already are about the money they invest in trade shows.

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HP Expands Wide Format Lines at IPEX

Hewlett Packard introduced a series of new wide format printers at the IPEX show in Birmingham England. These printers extend HP’s technology platforms and increase the addressable markets for HP and its customers.

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Bitstream to Acquire Assets of Press-sense

Yesterday, Bitstream, the developer of the Pageflex solutions suite announced it has agreed to acquire all of Press-sense’s assets for $6.5 million in cash.

For those of you that are not familiar with Bitstream, the company develops and sells a range of software technology including fonts, variable data publishing, Web-to-print, and more recently mobile Web browsers. The company, headquartered in Marlborough, Massachusetts, has been around since the early 1980s and has been public since 1996. Last fiscal year, Bitstream reported revenue of $21 million. Read more »

HP and Pitney Bowes Add a 22-Inch Web Product to their Product Portfolios

Today at IPEX HP previewed the T200, a 22-inch web width companion to the 30-inch T300 Inkjet Web Press. The T200, which is capable of color speeds of 200 feet per minute (875 color letter images per minute) and black speeds of 400 feet per minute (1,750 black letter images per minute), will be formally announced at Graph Expo and will become available in 2011. Though the T200 builds on many components and technologies used in the T300, it is not a slimmed down T300, but instead a new design that uses an innovative paper path that prints both sides of the web without using a turnbar. The product will also be used by Pitney Bowes as the print engine for the new IntelliJet 20.

Supporting CMYK plus a fifth color (in addition to the heads that apply the bonding agent), the T200, like the T300, uses a tight web design. Instead of two separate print engines the T200 has two imaging areas within a single integrated device. The configuration shown at IPEX prints the four process colors plus the bonding agent. There is space for another color in the device and HP said that it would be adding MICR capability at a later date. Both HP and Pitney Bowes expect the device to be “plug compatible” as a replacement to monochrome toner-based devices where the user is looking to move to color and mixed color and black & white workflows.

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Tonejet Up and Running at Ball Packaging

This month we have a small update on Tonejet, Ltd (Melbourn, Hertfordshire, UK), the developer of a proprietary electrostatic drop on demand technology that was the focus of some intriguing news last year. In July 2009, the company publicized its first major deal, with Ball Packaging of Germany. Under the terms of that agreement, Tonejet and Ball were to jointly develop a single pass, CMYK print system, based Tonejet Technology, to print metal cans at Ball’s manufacturing plant in Hasslock, Germany, with actual production to begin in Q1 2010.

InfoTrends spoke with Tonejet managers recently to check on the status of that custom installation, and learned that the printer is indeed up and running at Ball. The first commercial runs of CMYK onto metal cans began there in early April. The Ball customer will have to remain unnamed until sometime in May 2010. In the meantime, Tonejet’s CEO, Ray Southam, gave a few particulars: Read more »

Three Cut-Sheet Digital Printing Announcements Spark the Opening of ON DEMAND 2010

Lurking in the background as ON DEMAND 2010 opens are some very big questions about the economy, what the new combined Canon/Océ will look like, and whether any European visitors will make it to the show because of the volcano ash, but there is also some very big cut-sheet digital printing product news. Three new cut-sheet digital printing announcements are sure to be highlights of this year’s show: Read more »

Presstek Announces Larger Format Multi-Station DI Press

Presstek announced this week that the larger format DI product that it first mentioned at drupa 2008 will be shown at IPEX in May and Graph Expo in October. The product is called the Presstek 75DI and is a multi-unit press with a 31.02″ x 23.62″ (788 x 600 mm) format. This size, which will fit 6-up letter, is even larger than the 4-up format that InfoTrends initially assumed it would be. Presstek has chosen a tower design that will allow up to ten colors (plus optional aqueous coating). After beta testing, Presstek expects the 75DI will be available prior to the end of 2010. In the future it expects to offer features such as perfecting (i.e., duplexing), printing with UV inks, and other types of coating. List pricing will start at around $1,175,000 for a four-unit press and go up from there depending on the number of stations and other options.

Five-station Presstek 75DI

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Pre-IPEX media briefs – continued

After listening to several vendors so far at the pre-IPEX media briefs I have to admit this has been a slow start. With 100 days still to go before the show, it appears that some vendors felt the time not to be ripe to share too much detail on what will be on display at IPEX. It looks like they want to save the fanfare for the opening day of IPEX. Here is my response to the vendors: Rest assured, we will even come if we have heard a lot of details about the products to be launched. In fact having the press to write more about upcoming products would even help attract more visitors.

Despite this general reticence, there were some interesting product news. With the announcement by Domino Printing Sciences the array of suppliers of inkjet label printers has been enlarged again. The N600, due to be available from IPEX starting in May, is a continuous fed colour inkjet label printer. It uses Kyocera inkjet heads and has a resolution of 600 dpi at a speed of 50m/min (164 feet/min) with four grey levels per drop. Reducing the grey levels to three will allows even a faster speed of 75 m/min. The printer uses UV inks and is firmly targeted at label applications. Domino will provide unwind and rewind, with the opportunity to integrate in-line finishing steps, and also supplies its own front-end.

Pitney Bowes was one of the few vendors that spent considerable time on talking about its new product line of high speed continuous feed inkjet colour printers. Although the product was already announced in September last year and covered by an InfoTrends analysis, the interest of the press crowd was considerable. The Intellijet is the fruit of the strategic alliance with HP, in which Pitney Bowes has the exclusivity of the T300 inkjet web press for transactional and direct mail markets. In addition Pitney Bowes features its own DFE capable of processing data streams. At this opportunity Pitney Bowes announced the first sales to an U.S. based healthcare payment company, who is taking three printers at once.

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