Although around for more than a de-
cade, these machines began to infiltrate
the transaction printing market in 2007,
following the increase in inkjet suppliers
and model lines. I.T. Strategies projects
that by 2017, continuous-feed inkjet pages
will replace nearly all toner-based mono
continuous-feed pages. The sea change is
happening at a rapid pace—a 2008 In-
terquest study on transactional printing
reported that 80 percent of the production
equipment installed at respondent sites
were black-and-white.
Traditionally, commercial and transaction
printing sites have little in common. Trans-
actional printing companies have roots
in data processing rather than printing,
notes Pat McGrew, M-EDP and CMP, HP.
"Using information technology (IT) staff
to program the generation of utility bills,
credit card statements, and other forms of
transactional communications, the work-
flow for producing transactional printing is
nothing like sending PostScript files to an
imagesetter," she says.
These shops are typically focused on pro-
ductivity and throughput, given the very
high volume of pages that require process-
ing and the often rigid temporal deadlines
associated with their work, says Kevin Ho-
rey, vice president, Workflow & Solutions,
Graphic Communications Business Group,
Xerox. "They also have a much higher
expertise in managing and mining variable
data. Commercial printers, by contrast, are
traditionally more concerned with image
End product expands way
beyond simple black-and-
white documents.
By JOANN WHITCHER
T
ransactional printing is an original user of variable-
data content, with each bill, statement, invoice, check, or
insurance policy produced requiring content unique to the specific
individual. Historically produced on black-and-white equipment, high-speed
color inkjet printing innovations have transformed the market. According to a 2012 study by
InfoTrends commissioned by HP on "The Opportunities in High-Speed Inkjet," transaction printing is the leading
market for color inkjet—continuous-feed inkjet devices in particular.
18 MARCH 2014 • INKJET'S AGE www.MyPRINTResource.com
Demands on
Printers
Transactional
Increase
RICOH'S INFOPRINT 5000 is one
piece of equipment that is especially
well suited for transaction printing.
WITH PRINT speeds up to 600 feet
per minute in full-color and 800
feet per minute in mono and a duty
cycle up to 105 million colors or
129 million mono, letter-sized imag-
es per month, the HP T360 Color
Inkjet Web Press is built for jobs
formerly sent to an offset facility.
QPsupp_18-20_0314 Trans.indd 18 2/18/14 11:43 AM