Noel D'cunha's Drupa Update: So far it's been Benny Landa's show

Given the amount of excitement Benny Landa generated in the first two days of Drupa, with the latest nanography announcements being a case in point, it seems very much like Benny Landa’s Drupa.

07 May 2012 | By PrintWeek India

First Komori, then Manroland Sheetfed, and then the big one - Heidelberg - have all entered into strategic alliances to develop presses using nanography. This is some coup for Benny Landa and his team.

My estimable colleagues from PrintWeek, Druck+Medien, ProPrint, really can't think of anything like this happening before.

Sanity prevailed on day three and four when visitors asked what else will Drupa have in store for us in the way of mega-news?

Apart from all the new kit and new technology news from the manufacturers, an essential component of any big expo is The Landmark Order. My colleagues Samir Lukka and Sachin Shardul are prowling the expo to sniff out news of a big order from India. There’s news of couple of big players who are the Messe with their chequebooks ready once again.

Some of the big orders from the show are the already known knowns – KBA and Parsksons Packaging and ITC; Repro and its big digital spend with Kodak, Manroland is announcing the sale of 700 Hi Print six-colour to Hira Prints. Plus on the radar are a couple of newspaper orders from India.

About this being the “inkjet on steroids Drupa” or Inkjet 2.0? Again, early days, but the moot question is, inkjet fast enough (and price worthy) for many/any of the offset markets as yet?

However let's not forget that a litho press needs a long life to make it pay. Quality and speed on inkjet will be drastically improved in five years time (and consumer perceptions will change as well). Who wants to make the investment bet on offset over a 5-10 year period?

The digital presses that Indian printers are looking out for are: in the B2 format market, or in certain cases SRA2. These include: Screen, Fujifilm, Delphax, HP Indigo, Komori, Landa, Presstek, MGI, and Ryobi/Miyakoshi.

Also Indian print CEOs should realise the new threat to print is coming from different platforms of communication and different consumption of entertainment/information/media and not really different printing processes. Inkjet will have a great future; and so will web-to-print but mid-way through Drupa, it’s Landa’s Steve Jobs type resurrection which everyone is talking about.