Everything you need to know about Digital Printing – part 4
Tuesday, July 7th, 2009Everything you need to know about Digital Printing – part 4 – 7th July 2009
Other manufacturers were quick to develop colour copiers and standalone printers of their own. Over the next two decades the technology was developed for higher speed, quality and volume machines that became loosely known as digital production presses. Despite Canon’s early lead, it stuck to copier derived engines for more than 15 years. Its first speed production class machine, the imagePress 7000VP, was a completely new design announced in 2006 and shipped a year later in Europe. The first of what we would recognise as a modern digital colour production press was announced in 1993 by an obscure Belgian start up company called Xeikon. Actually, it was a spin off result of development effort at Afga in the 1980s to produce its own toner printers. Agfa initially provided finance for Xeikon and also set up a factory to make the dry toner. The first printer was called DCP-1 and established the basic format that it still uses today a reel fed machine with a tower containing multiple LED electro photographic colour units, arranged in line on both sides of the web, allowing duplex colour to be produced in a single pass.
While Xeikon was present at the Ipex of 1993, most of the publicity went to Agfa, which was selling the DCP-1 under its own badge as the Chromapress. The machine proved successful being, for its time, fairly fast and reliable. DCP-1 had a 320mm web width and was followed in 1997 by a second generation series, DCP32 plus a wider machine called DCP- 50D with a 500 mm web width. For years this was the only digital printer to handle an A3 page landscape (boosting productivity), or A2 portrait. All Xeikons were also notable for being able to produce seamless banner prints of virtually unlimited length.
This attracted attention from other manufacturers who wanted a digital colour machine in their own ranges, and Xeikon was happy to work with anyone. In addition to Agfa, several generations of these printers were sold in significant numbers by IBM (which renamed them infoPrint) and Xerox (which called then DocuColor 70, 90 and 100). Barco Graphics (now part of EskoArtwork) sold the printers with its own advanced variable data front ends, and Nilpeter sold a version adapted for single sided label printing.
Xeikon’s fortunes soared in the 1990s and by the end of the decade it was getting ambitious, showing off early photo printing lines and talking about a fast sheetfed printer. In 1999, it brought Nipson, a French developer of high speed monochrome digital printers.
To be continued…
See part one of this blog on digital thinking here
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