Looking back over 2019…

As the year draws to its close it’s time to look back over the most interesting stories and themes from this year.

Christmas lights in Seven Dials, London.

Inevitably, some of these will spill over into next year and I’ll cover those in the next story. But some just can’t wait, particularly the gift that keeps giving that is Xerox. It was entirely logical that Xerox would have to settle its differences with Fujifilm, following last year’s botched merger/ sale/ acquisition. I think that Fujifilm may have got the best of this deal, also not entirely unexpected. But I really admire the boldness, not to mention complete lunacy, behind Xerox tabling a bid for HP, which I doubt if anyone foresaw. The two companies exchanged a couple of fairly acrimonious letters last month, and there’s every chance of more entertainment to come in the next month or so now that Xerox has promised to take its offer directly to HP’s shareholders. This is a desperate move that is bound to lead to handbags being thrown in the playground early in the New Year, which is good news for journalists, less good for customers.

It almost feels wrong to pick on Xerox, a kind of lazy journalism, because Xerox is such an easy target. And yet, Xerox has also done some really clever things this year. For all the mess that the company made of Impika, the Baltoro inkjet press appears to be a solid performer, putting inkjet as a core competence at the heart of the American operation. I’m also impressed by Xerox’s efforts to add embellishments directly to its dry toner presses, which we saw firstly with the Iridesse. But this year Xerox has also expanded this concept to its more affordable machines, bringing out the C9065/9070 and adding a new Adaptive Toner kit to the existing C60/C70 printers. Xerox has also been quietly building up an interesting portfolio in 3D printing, which I’ll come back to in more detail early next year.

I think it’s fair to say that Xaar also has had a fairly bad year and would rather forget 2019  altogether. The company pumped millions into developing a range of thin film printheads but finally had to pull the plug and accept defeat a couple of months back. I think this will be one of those rare cases where the industry as a whole, let alone the people at Xaar, will rue this loss.  Xaar was starting to make real headway with its 5601-series printheads, which would have led to some interesting presses and given other printhead manufacturers some serious competition, that ultimately would have benefited us all. Xaar is by no means down and out but its ambitions have undoubtedly been pegged back, at least for now.

This year will also be notable for a couple more nails in the Kodak coffin. In April, Kodak sold off its Flexographic Packaging Division (FPD) to Montagu Private Equity LLP. This now operates as a standalone company under the Miraclon name, though it still uses Kodak branding. Kodak said at the time that it would use the money it earned from this sale to reduce its outstanding debts. Then in August Kodak announced that it had sold its factory in Xiamen, China where it manufactured offset printing plates, including the Sonora processless plate. Kodak had invested significant sums in this factory, which was bought by Lucky HuaGuang Graphics, and the sale seemed to me to indicate Kodak’s continuing financial weakness.

There is a lot of gloom amongst journalists regarding Kodak with a general assumption that the company is slowly fading away. But there is also some cause for optimism in the shape of the UltraStream heads, assuming that Kodak can get this technology into the market quickly enough. I still think that Kodak’s continuous inkjet, and the UltraStream in particular, is one of the most interesting inkjet technologies around and it would be a mistake to write Kodak off. The glory days of Kodak are clearly long gone, though I did feel a touch of nostalgia last week when I dusted off my grandfather’s Rolleicord camera and loaded a roll of TMax 120. And I have to say that it felt good to be shooting on film once again.

The Landa presses have finally started shipping, with several now installed and running. This year also saw advances in the production inkjet market, with Screen launching its Jet520HD+ and Canon making improvements to its ProStream 1000, both of which can print to offset stocks. There have also been a couple of inkjet presses launched into the lower end of the production print market, with the Riso Valezus T2100 and the Kyocera TaskAlfa Pro 15000C.

There have also been a couple of notable new wide format printers announced. Thus SwissQprint launched its first roll-fed printer, the Karibu, while EFI went the other way and showed off a new flatbed printer, the Pro30f. 

The Label Expo show highlighted a distinct shift into hybrid solutions. For some vendors, this means presses that combine flexo with digital technology, most notably Bobst’s new and highly impressive DM5, as well as the new 430mm wide MPS Symjet, which is a much neater integration than the original 330mm Symjet. Both use the print engine from a Domino N617i printer, though MPS has also partnered with Colordyne to use its Memjet-based 3600AP print engine on the MPS EXL Packaging press. Several vendors also created hybrids that included digital print with flexo converting, such as Mark Andy, with its Digital Pro 3 that incorporates a rebadged Konica Minolta AccurioLabel 230, and Screen, which partnered with Rotocontrol to add a complete converting line to its L350UV series of inkjet presses.

I see that a number of inkjet presses, particularly Durst’s new Tau RSCi, are coming very close to the dream of offering a realistic alternative to flexo, in terms of both speed and quality. However, it’s also clear that most of the demand is for cheaper machines able to take care of very short runs, such as the Konica Minolta AccurioLabel 230.

This also plays well to Memjet’s strengths and I expect we will be seeing a lot more from Memjet next year. But its worth noting that Memjet had a very good year in 2019, launching both a new four colour printhead, the DuraFlex and a larger version of its single colour DuraLink XL.

The corrugated sector has really started to take off, with EFI in particular enjoying success judging by the number of Nozomis that its been installing this year. Koenig and Bauer has managed to sell its first CorruJet, which is essentially an adapted version of the Rotajet. Koenig and Bauer has also set up a joint venture with Durst to develop presses specifically for the folding carton and corrugated markets.

This year also saw a number of advances in both the textile and the industrial printing spaces. On the textile side, we’ve seen HP jump into the dye sublimation market with the launch of its S-series printers, while at the other end of the scale, EFI has ramped up the installations for its Bolt single pass press. I think that Kornit’s Presto, which does away with the need for both pre- and post-treatment, deserves special mention. Equally, on the industrial side, Roland Europe has proved surprisingly creative with its approach of repurposing several of Roland’s standard wide format printers for specific industrial and decor applications. I think it’s fair to say that I’ll have more to say about industrial, and indeed also 3D printing, next year.

However, since this is the last post of this year I’ll sign off by saying thankyou to everyone reading this site and for all the useful feedback that people have sent me over the year. It remains only for me to wish Merry Christmas to all of you – I hope that everyone has a restful holiday because 2020 is shaping up to be a busy year for all of us in the printing world, and that can only be a good thing!