Looks like a B2 digital show during Drupa

In case you missed the flurry of announcements, it seems Drupa will be the B2 digital show. Fujifilm and Screen said they’d give their inkjet machines long-awaited commercial launches. Then, when we all started to think ‘team toner’ had no intentions of seriously straying outside its SRA3 heartland, HP unveiled a family of B2 products that will be commercially available early next year, and Xeikon alluded to its own most-likely web-fed offering, the evocatively named Quantum.

Not wanting to be left out, French manufacturer MGI then revealed it would be demo-ing a working prototype of its take on inkjet B2 in Dusseldorf next month.

Now the already crowded fray is set to be joined by another toner-based machine, which looks deceptively like an offset unit-style press, jointly developed by Ryobi and Miyakoshi. Within hours of those two firms going public, Benny Landa broke silence, still in hushed tones, on what he will be showing: B1, B3 and – yes, you guessed it – a B2 digital press utilising his ‘Nanography’ process.

Meanwhile HP has bolstered its burgeoning imprinting business with the addition of a 244m/min print module to take on market leader Kodak’s Prosper S5 and S10 printheads.

The thermal inkjet C800 technology was primarily developed to be retro-fitted to conventional web printing lines, for single-pass, hybrid offset-digital print production.

According to HP, the technology is suitable for monochrome or process colour applications and has a print swathe of 108mm, with up to five heads capable of being stitched together. Each of the 600dpi, user-replaceable printheads feature 10,560 nozzles.

Please meet the global team of PrintWeek at our stall, Hall 06 / C63 during the show