Inkjet & Digital Printing

Expanded HP Indigo Portfolio Enhances High-value, High-volume Digital Printing Possibilities

Wednesday 12. March 2008 - HP today announced new HP Indigo solutions for the commercial and industrial print markets, including 7000, W7200 and WS6000 Indigo model digital presses for higher-volume usage that offer significantly higher breakeven points than analog printing.

The presses, along with backwards-compatible enhancements to the best-selling HP Indigo press 5500 and a new comprehensive HP SmartStream workflow portfolio, create an increased range of productive and profitable digital printing opportunities for HP Indigo customers.

The new generation of HP Indigo digital presses offers industry-leading image quality for both static and variable jobs. Targeting key production print markets such as general commercial printing, direct marketing, books on demand, photo merchandise and labels and packaging, the presses shift the fundamental economics of digital printing in a way that can accelerate the transition of analog print to digital.

“Fifteen years after the first Indigo press sparked the digital color printing revolution, the expanded HP Indigo digital solutions portfolio marks another major step forward for the digital printing industry,” said Alon Bar-Shany, vice president and general manager, Indigo division, HP. “All over the world, customers’ growth is fueled by the high-quality, high-value digital printing powered by HP Indigo solutions.”

HP Indigo presses offer offset- and photo-quality printing in up to seven colors on a choice of more than 1,300 off-the-shelf certified substrates, enabling a wide variety of high-value, high-quality print applications.

The new solutions include:

HP Indigo 7000 Digital Press, offering breakthrough cost of ownership and flexibility for high-volume digital printing
Enhancements to the HP Indigo press 5500, offering increased productivity, automation and application range
HP Indigo W7200 Digital Press, a continuous feed duplex press for very high volume production line printing of books, direct-mail and transpromotional applications
HP Indigo WS6000 Digital Press, a web-fed labels and packaging press with double the productivity of current offerings
HP SmartStream, leveraging a graphic arts portfolio of workflow components, helps customers create digital printing production solutions for a broad range of market segments and application needs.
The HP Indigo 7000: A new benchmark for all commercial print technologies

Expected to be available at drupa 2008 in May, the HP Indigo 7000 Digital Press delivers fast production speeds of 120 high-quality four-color A4-size pages per minute for customers in general commercial, direct-marketing, photo merchandise, and book and publications printing. It is optimized to print large numbers of static jobs with run lengths ranging from one copy into the thousands, as well as variable-data work requiring the “every page is different” capabilities of digital.

Designed to produce up to 3.5 million four-color pages or 5 million one- and two-color pages per month with true offset and photo quality, the HP Indigo 7000 is targeted at customers with average monthly volumes in excess of 1 million pages. The press complements the HP Indigo press 5500 designed for customers with volumes of 300,000 to 1 million pages. For high-print volume customers, the HP Indigo 7000 offers a total cost of ownership that significantly increases the break-even point against offset.(1)

More productivity from fastest-selling HP Indigo press

Launched in May 2007, the HP Indigo press 5500 is the fastest-selling press in the history of HP. It has been upgraded and enhanced with options allowing greater productivity with an additional feeder, in-line connectivity to the HP Indigo UV Coater and a kit to enable printing on thicker media up to 18 pt. board/450 microns. With EskoArtwork’s software plug-ins and cutting table, the increased media range enables customers to use the press for folding carton work. The press includes an on-press oil recycling system that reduces the use of imaging oil by roughly 50 percent.

The HP Indigo W7200: The most productive high-volume, offset-quality digital press

The HP Indigo W7200 Digital Press builds on the success of the HP Indigo press w3250 for very high-volume, application-focused commercial printing. The HP Indigo W7200 can produce up to 7.5 million A4-size color page images or 30 million monochrome A4 page images per month. It combines proven HP Indigo offset quality with the breakthrough productivity required for a variety of applications, including on-demand and short-run book printing, high-volume personalized color direct-mail campaigns and high-value transpromotional statements.

The press’ 317 mm x 980 mm image area significantly boosts productivity and enables enhanced imposition for jobs with the popular 6-inch x 9-inch (153 mm x 229 mm) print format as well as enabling new applications. The HP Indigo W7200 Digital Press also supports Advanced Function Presentation/Intelligent Printer Data Streams (AFP/IPDS) content used in transactional and transpromotional printing. The HP Indigo W7200 Digital Press is expected to be available in late 2009.

The HP Indigo WS6000: Double the productivity

The new HP Indigo WS6000 Digital Press extends HP’s label and packaging industrial press portfolio with a longer-run, higher-volume solution. It addresses jobs up to approximately 4,000 linear meters (13,000 linear feet), and offers total cost of ownership advantages for converters producing more than 300,000 linear meters per month. It complements the highly successful HP Indigo press ws4500 targeted at customers with monthly volumes of 150,000-300,000 linear meters.

The HP Indigo Digital Press WS6000 prints at 30 meters (~100 feet) per minute in four colors. Featuring the same high quality for which HP Indigo label and packaging presses are known, the WS6000 press prints up to seven colors on a broad range of media, including thin flexible packaging substrates from 12 microns (0.5 points) and folding carton media up to 450 microns (18 points), as well as label and shrink sleeve media. The press’ repeat length of 980 mm (38.58 inches) permits greater productivity and drives even lower costs per label. The HP Indigo WS6000 is expected to be available in early 2009.

HP offers comprehensive workflow for a range of scenarios

HP SmartStream leverages a graphic arts portfolio of workflow components to provide workflow management from job creation to fulfillment. Combining HP and partner components results in greater flexibility, with a choice of solutions that are customizable and scalable to unique business needs to address key market segments. HP Indigo customers will be the first to benefit from the new HP SmartStream workflow portfolio, which will be expanded to other HP graphics users at a later stage.

HP SmartStream components shown for the first time today include the HP SmartStream Production Pro Print Server and the HP SmartStream Production Plus Print Server, Powered by Creo.

The HP SmartStream Production Pro Print Server is a high-performance raster image processor and press controller designed to drive large volumes of jobs, including complex variable-data jobs. This off-press solution takes workflow tasks out of the press room and puts them in the pre-press environment where they can be efficiently and centrally managed.

A highly flexible, centralized and scalable solution, the server can manage up to 12 HP Indigo presses, with automatic load balancing and single point of control. With robust integration to print service providers’ management information systems, the Production Pro facilitates efficient management of production processes.

The HP SmartStream Production Plus Print Server, Powered by Creo, includes a complete graphic arts feature set for out-of-the-box job control. It is compatible with all HP Indigo commercial sheetfed presses and is now scalable to drive multiple presses from a single server rack. The Production Plus features advanced hybrid offset/digital production support including for Prinergy.

Both the Production Pro and the Production Plus Print Servers support standard file formats, including Personalized Print Markup Language, Optimized PDF and Postscript.

Driving growth in digital production printing

With an installed base approaching 5,000 presses, HP Indigo has an established track record of driving customer success. The number of pages produced by customers on HP Indigo equipment worldwide increased 45 percent from 2006 to 2007, and HP has seen quarterly page growth for HP Indigo presses exceed 40 percent in every quarter since Q1 2003.

HP Indigo has more than 400 multi-press customers, including multiple customers with more than 10 presses.

All solutions mentioned above are to be shown at the HP booth at drupa, May 29-June 11.