Inkjet International Days

On March 19th Océ (part of the Canon Group) hosted an International Inkjet Days event at its site in Poing Germany (just east of Munich).  Océ invited a group of industry analysts to see the latest enhancements to its impressive inkjet product portfolio and it offered educational sessions on inkjet technology, document security and color perception.

Océ has built a fantastic customer experience center at its Poing site which allows it to showcase multiple products and configurations for prospective customers. Its latest inkjet products, the JetStream 5500 and ColorStream 3900, were up and running for us to see firsthand. Target applications for the products are transactional, books, direct mail, and newspapers.

The market for high speed color inkjet printers is growing.  Sales of continuous feed, high speed color inkjet presses now account for roughly 40% of all sales of continuous feed printers in North America and 50% in W. Europe. The main players are Océ, InfoPrint (Ricoh), HP, Kodak, and Screen.

A large portion of the recent sales are going into the transactional printing market. While the printing of statements, bills, and invoices is slowly migrating to online presentment and payment; transactional printing remains the largest digital printing application today. And the move to color is on.  While the upfront cost of a color inkjet printer is higher than a monochrome laser printer there are several operational advantages. The cost of black only printing is much lower with the inkjet device, the expense and hassle of preprinted forms is eliminated and, of course, there is the opportunity to do color onserts and messaging.