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