Inkjet's Age, a print supplement to Quick Printing, is a business and technology brand dedicated to corporate and senior management and focusing on issues surrounding inkjet printing technology in all its forms. Inkjet's Age covers the industry news,
Issue link: https://quickprinting.epubxp.com/i/425366
14 DECEMBER 2014 • INKJET'S AGE www.MyPRINTResource.com and closer to offset quality. Having better inks gives the print clarity and gives near-offset quality printing in smaller jobs, with personalization. Companies used to print the same paper multiple times in order to get the shells, and then print the variable data, finally finishing it and inserting it. With the technology that inkjet is bringing to printers, these multiple steps can be consoli- dated to help reduce production time and overall costs. IA: Which applications do you think will have the biggest growth/largest impact in 2015 due to the evolution of produc- tion inkjet technologies? Why? Allenson: Percent of direct mail produced on high-speed inkjet will continue to grow. Short- and mid-run-length book work will transition more towards inkjet, including books with coated pa- per requirements such as catalogs and magazines. Boer: Within the next 12 months, most of the page volumes will still be replacement of continuous-feed monochrome toner pages, which means transaction and some direct mail pages. Longer term, IT Strategies is projecting there will be an evenly divided impact on pages coming from continuous-feed toner and offset displacement, as well as the more important development of new application pages. There will be a time within the not-to- distant future that will shift favor of all print delivered through mail from static to dynamic and relevant content. Increasing postage costs will assure that any mail piece has to be content relevant, and recipient's expectations will become ever higher that anything that is not filtered out (i.e., electronic communication) has to be critical to them. Graupman: With inkjet's higher speeds we anticipate more penetration into commercial print and direct mail. Inkjet will continue to raise the bar, reaching for that elusive glossy coated inkjet stock—with inks that dry quickly and adhere well—at a reasonable cost. The other migration is in the trade book space. Black ink density on book papers continues to improve and we expect to see more inkjet providers achieve that magical 1.2 black density level for some pigmented inks. We believe we are there today. Herold: It is not a specific application that will have high growth rate, it is a specific way of communication that will see growth. Where customers are leveraging our leadership inkjet solutions to effectively and precisely communicate with their end customers, they will see growth. Print will stay relevant by delivering the right information, to the right person, at the right time, in a format that can drive positive behavioral change. Meldrum: We are seeing the increased availability of higher resolution heads for single-pass printing, coupled with ink chemistry that can address a growing range of substrates. Taken together, these developments will allow higher quality graphics to be produced on papers ranging from plain papers to machine-coated offset papers, which will support the mar- ket growth—including accessing a greater range of marketing and book and pamphlet printing applications. Poulin: Key drivers for inkjet technology are applications migrating from traditional printing techniques to digital technology. InfoTrends identifies five key application areas for production print: general office, promotional, publishing, transaction, and utility. Three of these—transaction, promo- tional, and publishing—have been impacted significantly by production color inkjet. Transaction was the largest category for high-speed inkjet systems, accounting for nearly 40 percent of the volume. Promotional (primarily direct mail) followed in second place at about 29 percent, and publishing (mostly books) rounded out the top three with over 26 percent.