In the past week there has been the new agreement between Kodak and Ricoh concerning an extension of ongoing marketing of the same products through the Ricoh channels.
I am currently attending an interesting sort of trade show in Switzerland where most of the major digital printer suppliers were showing products and their linkages with the Hunkeler finishing systems. There were a few new announcements but perhaps the major announcements came from Kodak.Last year at drupa Kodak introduced their new drop on demand inkjet high-speed color press, the Kodak Versamark VL2000. This is the first drop on demand press from Kodak and countered all Kodak’s previous arguments that the future of inkjet was only going to be found with continuous inkjet technology, as used in all other Versamark products.
The New Versamark VL 2000 press was similar to many other new inkjet colour presses with a print width of 20 inches and a speed of 75 meters/min in four-color mode. I commented at the time that I felt that this was the first of a range of presses using the same technology and we could expect to see a development of the press running at 150 meters/min.
The reason for this was that the press used print heads from another supplier that could operate at 75 meters/min in two-colour mode and 150 meters/min in single colour mode. The Versamark VL2000 had to print head arrays to handle four colours and thus ran at 75 meters/min.
Today the new Versamark VL6000 press was announced and believe it or not it runs at 150 meters/min. While Kodak has not stated how this higher speed is achieved you can be sure there are now four print head arrays in the product.
The press can also still run at 75 meters/min but in doing so the print resolution increases allowing higher quality printing. Kodak also announced a further new product this being the Versamark VL4000 and this runs at 125 meters/min but with a reduced resolution of 600 x 360 dpi (compared with the 600 x 600 dpi of the other presses). This is an upgrade of the VL2000 and from my understanding this is predominantly a software upgrade to the presses controller. All these presses can be run as single of dual engine systems. The dual engine systems are the Versamark VL 2200, 4200 and 6200.
These new products make the Kodak Versamark VL range more competitive against the other suppliers’ products. The VL6200 how fully compares against the Océ 2200 in terms of speed at 150 meters/min and I would not be surprised if Kodak does not enhance it further in future for higher speed by dripping the resolution in one direction to achieve higher imaging speeds.
The Versamark VL4200 also compares with the speeded up Screen Truepress Jet 520 and IBM Infoprint 5000 that achieve speeds around 125 meters/min by reducing one imaging resolution.
The interesting point however is not how these new products compare with the competition, but how they compare with the existing Kodak Versamark VT3000 and VX5000 continuous inkjet presses from Kodak. The new Versmark VL6200 matches the VX5000 for speed but offers a higher quality of image with better colour reproduction through the use of pigmented ink. Kodak states that the Versamark VX5000 gives a lower total cost of ownership, however for lower cost of ownership Kodak is also offering a dye ink option for the VL2000/4000/6000 that should possibly match the cost of ownership of the VT3000 and VX5000 presses.
My interpretation of this is Kodak is setting out its stall for the future. It is not the death of the existing continuous inkjet presses but is a statement that there may be no more such presses to come, and this current continuous inkjet (CIJ) technology has reached the end of the road. Next year Kodak should introduce the first of its Stream CIJ based colour presses that it previewed to intense interest at drupa, and these will sell alongside the drop on demand Versamark VL 2000/4000/6000 presses.
Currently Kodak has just started shipping monochrome Stream print heads for adding into hybrid press systems. Stream based colour products will introduce a new level of image quality to high-speed inkjet presses and will be targeted against existing sheet and webfed offset presses. The Versmark VL presses will then be the presses to be sold for IT applications like transactional and transpromo printing as well as direct mail and possibly book printing applications.
This approach will be a strong product line and should be fully implemented by the time the printing industry climbs out of recession. In the past nine months since drupa, Kodak has done well with sales of high-speed Versamark colour inkjet presses and to my understanding still maintains a lead in market share compared with its competitors.
The new Versmark VL and forthcomiing Stream product ranges should allow Kodak to maintain a very strong presence as the high-speed inkjet printing markets moves forward. This is really the future of Kodak.
