By all accounts, Drupa 2008 was a more successful show than many expected which augurs well for the future of print. Due to itsinfluence, plus the fact that it is only held every four years, it is no wonder that manufacturers hold back, or rush forward, new developments so that they can be launched at the show and cause some surprises.

Admittedly, there was talk before the show opened about it being the ‘Inkjet Drupa’. However, no one really expected the technology to have such a significant impact.

Even on the stands of major traditional pre-press manufacturers, inkjet printing took centre stage pushing plate production into a back corner which one wit described as ‘Jurassic Park’. Mind you, to some extent, you could not blame these manufacturers considering the size and impact of some of the ‘newcomers’ stands such as Hewlett Packard and Xerox, as well as the claims they were making for their digital presses.

Indeed, it is amazing just how far the technology, particularly inkjet, has advanced in such a short period of time. But has it really?

OK, so far as we could see, there were no mock-ups, ie empty boxes with a video screen though, with one or two of the presses, no one was allowed near enough to check. In addition, some of the machines were not actually running, or at least not at the speed or output quality being claimed, while others were only being run for short periods, implying lack of consistency and/or reliability at the moment. Nor are the majority of them going to be commercially available for at least another year, if not longer.

Then there is the matter of economic viability: there is not much point getting excited if the market will not bear the cost. Take the mass (rather than one-off) production of newspapers as an example. Perhaps this is a bit extreme but there were at least six digital press manufacturers at Drupa talking about using their equipment for printing newspapers, if not actually demonstrating it.

Of course, the use of digital printing is not a new idea in this market. Since 2001, Oce’s Newspaper Digital Network with its toner-based electrophotographic Varioprint printers has been used for printing short runs remotely, enabling Day A copies of foreign publications to be distributed to business and tourist communities. However, the take-up has been slow, there being only around ten systems installed world-wide, while the number of copies produced each day is tiny in relative terms.

We were told all this would change with the arrival of full colour and faster inkjet systems. This occurred with the launch of the Kodak Versamark and Screen Truepress presses some 18 months ago. Both companies kept saying that they expected to receive their first newspaper order any time but by Drupa nothing had been announced.

Indeed, the industry was somewhat caught by surprise at the show when Agfa officially announced that it not only had a newspaper printing system based on its’ Dotrix inkjet technology but that it was installing the first one this month. Although it did not say so, it is believed that the system is being installed in Portugal.

Since Drupa, it has also been announced that Newsworld is to install Screen’s Truepress Jet520 in New York following the signing of a four-year contract with UK-based Associated Newspapers. Starting in September, the press will print the Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday, initially the UK edition though a New York edition, complete with local content with advertising will be produced in due course.

It will be interesting to see exactly what the set-up is at these two installations because there are some stumbling blocks with the digital printing of newspapers. For one thing, as with conventional printing, the production window is small since newspaper publishers want the latest deadlines but to be on the streets as early as possible. This is not a problem with web-offset presses but even with the fastest inkjet presses, such as the JetStream from Oce, the maximum output is 3,000 24-page newspapers an hour, a figure which decreases as the number of pages increase.

Secondly, there is the cost factor. Some publishers may be prepared to pay a little more to enable them, for example, to get a foothold in a new market but for the majority they compare the cost with that of traditional production and it is nowhere near though it is coming down. For instance, Hewlett Packard says that the target price for its 762 mm wide 122 mpm Inkjet Web Press which will be available in autumn 2009 is around US$2.5 million for a twin-engined configuration, that is around half the price of some competitor’s machines with a similar specification. HP’s targeted consumables price is under US$0.01 for a 4-colour 4/0 letter size page, while Oce quotes below one US cent per A4 page with 35 per cent coverage but including all machine related costs.

Even so, the cost will have to come down significantly more for digital printing to have any big impact on the newspaper industry. Or, to put it another way, conventional newspaper printers, or conventional commercial printers for that matter, are not going to become dinosaurs for many years to come.