It's early on day 3 of the Graph Expo show. I'm up and about early at the Hyatt Regency and I've made way to the pool grotto to enjoy the sunrise.
Since I had covered most of the show floor on day one, day two was a chance to go back and gather additional information on some of those products that I found interesting. In addition there were some additional devices like the KIP Color wide formats, and the OCE Color wide formats that I wanted to get some additional data on to help me in my day to day selling efforts.
Konica Minolta
I arrived on the show floor a little past 10AM, and my first stop was to visit the KonicaMinolta booth. KonicaMinolta was showing the C71 Label Press with all of the additional 3rd party accessories. I was extremely impressed with the print quality, the speed and the accuracy of the re-winder.
Print resolution is 1200x1200 dpi native, color quality of the labels was exceptional. I had tried to see the C71 on day one, however there was an issue with the re-winder. Day two saw the re-winder fixed, and the C71 was printing awesome full color labels at a pretty fast clip. MRSP pricing for the system with the winders (need two of those) is $299K.
Xerox
After the KonicaMinolta booth, I made my way over to the Xerox booth. My goal was to see the Xerox Object Printer in action. The Xerox booth was jammed with people, and it took me a good ten minutes before I finally got close to the Object printer.
I was treated to a short demonstration of Xerox xmpie (it's my understanding that Xmpie is a digital store front/using vdp which allows users to submit print jobs to a Xerox product) which allowed me to customize a graphic image and text on for printing my image on a 3D product (such as mugs, pens, beverage containers, etc). I was impressed with the speed of print, the accuracy and the quality of the image. The Xerox Object printer printed a graphic image and my name on an aluminum beverage container. AWESOME!
The Xerox Object printer had me thinking about the cost of the ink used per piece, I was told that Xerox has a costing program that will determine the cost of the ink used, thus you would be able figure a cost per piece and then develop your retail cost. At a cost of $150k, I was curious where this type of printer could be placed, would this work with an add specialties company?
Figuring a lease cost of almost $3,000 per month, it would take a heck of a lot of printing on pens to make your payment. However, if you think about some of the larger items that you can print an image on, the Xerox Object printer may offer additional opportunities to have larger percentages of profit on higher ticket specialty items.
EFI
Just about mid-day, John and I attended the EFI Press conference. EFI presented their case that office printing is indeed slowing and spoke in depth about the printing applications that are available with their new Nozomi Inkjet Press.
After looking up Nozomi on wikipedia, I found the word translates in Kanji for beauty. The Nozomi was first introduced at Drupa in May of this year. The Nozomi is a single pass color inkjet press that would be used for high-speed corrugated board production.
Ricoh
Ricoh did not have a both as large as Xerox nor KonicaMinolta, however there was quite a bit of traffic around the C9110 high speed color press, and even more traffic for the C7100 series. I had heard from someone at the show that Ricoh was showing a fluorescent neon yellow toner.
Sure enough, Ricoh had sample prints of the neon yellow toner on a black substrate. After speaking with the Ricoh rep, he explained that the neon yellow will be available on or around December of this year. In addition they were engaging with end users about their thoughts for other fluorescent colors. It's an interesting development and I'm curious to see the applications. The neon yellow would be used in the fifth station in place of the white or clear. I wonder how long it will be until we see production systems that house six colors or more.
Show Floor
The rest of the day was centered on gathering additional information from Epson, Intec, Canon, Oce, KIP and Riso for a blog that I will write once I get home. It's not easy walking these show floors and by the end of the day I was exhausted, my android app showed that I had logged more than 12,000 steps by the end of the day.
More to come later this week!
-=Good Selling=-
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