The CiPress work in Building 208 in Webster is set off from the manufacturing going on around it by wide strips of tape on the floor. The advantage: Those strips are easy to move as Xerox Corp.'s CiPress program grows.
The document and business process outsourcing company in September unveiled and began taking North American orders for its CiPress 500 Production Inkjet press at GraphExpo, the annual commercial printing trade show held in Chicago. The press should be available worldwide in 2012, said Kevin G. Horey, vice president of production product marketing.
For Xerox, CiPress (pronounced "Cypress") is like its high-speed iGen or Nuvera digital printing presses — not just a product, but a platform of technology that will spawn a variety of products with different speeds and capabilities.
And like iGen and Nuvera, CiPress is being manufactured at the company's Webster campus.
Inside Building 208 is a specific CiPress section of product engineering alongside three assembly bays. A couple of hundred employees are now dedicated to the CiPress business line, said Wayne A. Buchar, chief engineer of the inkjet color platform development. Xerox decided to manufacture the CiPress in Webster in large part because much of the engineering and development also was done there and there is value in keeping the engineering and manufacturing in close proximity, Buchar said.
Webster is Xerox's largest manufacturing site in the world. Aside from the high-end iGen and Nuvera presses, it also makes products such as fusers, photoreceptors and toner there.
CiPress' roots in part came from Xerox's 2000 acquisition of Tektronix Inc.'s printer division for $950 million. The technology that company was developing resulted in Xerox's ColorQube — the office printing system that uses waxy, crayon-like blocks of solid ink. But there was also an understanding at Xerox that solid ink would work even better in large-scale commercial printing, Buchar said.
The CiPress uses a similar solid ink, though one that comes in granular form instead of golf ball-sized ColorQube blocks. And CiPress puts the ink droplets directly on paper, while ColorQube applies it to a drum that then puts the melted ink onto a surface
The natural customers, Horey said, are similar to those Xerox has talked about for Nuvera and iGen — printers of bills, direct mail, books and manuscripts.
But while those presses handle individual sheets of paper, CiPress is fed by large rolls of paper, letting it run much faster than the sheet-fed machines. While an iGen can print 110 sheets a minute, the CiPress has print speeds of 500 feet a minute, or the equivalent of more than 2,000 pages, giving it capabilities like offset presses — those mechanical monsters used, for example, in such high-volume jobs as printing magazines and newspapers.
"We're not trying to replace offset," Buchar said. "We're trying to go where offset can't."
That neighborhood where offset can't go is getting increasingly crowded, with a number of companies competing, including Eastman Kodak Co. with its Prosper press system.
But Xerox sees the waterless ink as giving it an edge, Horey said, because it can print on regular, untreated paper and the inks don't bleed through the paper, making for easier double-sided printing. The CiPress also doesn't need a drying step in printing. IDC, a technology market research firm, called the Xerox ink "a unique differentiator."
The inks are made by Xerox in Oregon.
A complete CiPress system — with a pair of 20-foot-long print engines and a human-sized stack of computer servers for crunching the data that goes on the page, will cost close to $3.8 million.
That doesn't count the non-Xerox equipment that a printer might end up buying as part of the system, such as a cutter to turn the finished roll into sheets.
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