Money, lots of it, is being poured into digital printing research and technologies that will assuredly keep print on the desktop and elsewhere for many years to come. By Laurel Brunner
DuPont Building Bridges
We are all well familiar with HP, Canon and Xerox and their megabuck balance sheets, but we tend to hear far less from a player that is also spending a lot of money to develop digital printing technologies and markets. That company is DuPont.
In terms of size, DuPont sits somewhere in between Xerox, Canon and HP, however for digital print technologies it has a far lower profile than any of them. Yet DuPont is a multinational chemicals company, which employs 60,000 worldwide. It was founded in 1802 to make explosives and there are now five DuPont divisions with more than 75 research labs worldwide. The company is active in over 70 countries with revenues of almost $27 billion. The bit of it that deals with the graphic arts is DuPont Imaging Technologies, which comes under DuPont’s Electronics and Communications division, and in 2005 contributed $3.5 billion to the company’s total revenues of $26.6 billion. DuPont’s research and development teams for graphic arts products also benefit from research done in other DuPont divisions, most notably the coatings colour technologies created for paints, and especially for cars.
There are several business units within Imaging Technologies which together support colour, display and printing technologies, including inks. The Digital Printing business unit consists of OEM ink manufacture and digital printing systems sales. The other divisions within Imaging Technologies are Colour Proofing, Packaging Graphics, DuPont Authentication and Thermal Colour Filters and Display Enhancements.
Industry standard proofing The Colour Proofing business is based on the DuPont Cromanet CS (Colour Server) software and the DuPont Cromalin proofing engines. DuPont is well known, perhaps even best known, for its Cromalin proofing systems, long the industry’s benchmark for proofs. In recent years the company has moved to develop replacement technologies for Cromalin, the Cromalin Blue and the Cromalin Largo. In the course of Cromalin’s long and healthy history DuPont learned a great deal about practical colour management in the graphic arts. This knowledge, along with DuPont’s expertise in colour management for other applications, has been brought together for the Cromanet server and the new proofing engines.
The 610mm (24-inch) and 1118mm (44-inch) Cromalin Largo engines cost from $13,300 to $17,100 depending on the configuration. They were co-developed with Canon, to bring robust office based engineering and manufacture to the proofing market. DuPont supplies all parts of the system including substrates, inks and engines for assuring constant output quality. This is not just for proof to proof consistency, but ideally for machine to machine consistency. It also provides DuPont with an entry level proofing system to offer its customers and their clients.
New digital presses The Digital Printing Systems division within Imaging Technology takes care of the Artistri digital presses for printing fabrics and the Cromaprint 22UV digital press. The Cromaprint 22UV and the Cromalin Largo have been available since April 2006. In September DuPont introduced the 18UV which is expected to come to market in 2007, and we expect to see a larger than 2.2 metre device soon after. The Cromaprint technology straddles both Digital Printing and Colour Communications divisions, a crossover which will at some point extend to Packaging Graphics. Currently this division is responsible for the Cyrel thermal imaging system for flexo, a market that DuPont expects to move to inkjet.
DuPont Authentication is a quite fascinating division within Imaging Technologies which provides anti-counterfeiting, security, identification and brand protection products using advanced covert and overt technologies. These include such intrigues as ‘Izon Deep 3D Embedded Polymer OVDs’ (optically variable devices) that ‘provide a deep, three-dimensional overt authentication imaging solution for immediate, unambiguous product and document authentication’ and special films that use an optical coding system for visible and machine-readable product authentications. This suggests interesting possibilities for packaging applications.
Thermal Colour Filters and Display Enhancements provides technologies used in colour monitors and to enhance LCD monitor performance. DuPont produces over 50 of the world’s holographic printing technologies, as well as the digital colour filters used in LCD displays.
Intimate sales approach When you look at it in a holistic sense, there are plenty of reasons for DuPont to shout aloud about what it does in the graphic arts industry. Perhaps one reason for the relatively low profile is the fact that DuPont has such a large and loyal customer base. The repro market may have taken a battering in recent years, but there is still plenty of business being done for agencies and publishers. The business to business approach to marketing is serving DuPont well, as is the company’s very intimate approach to sales. DuPont sells bespoke systems and products, working with customers and prospects to explore workflows and where DuPont technology might fit. The company uses a matrix of values to guide buyers to the best technology for them using criteria that have greater or lesser importance and relevance in a given production scenario. Such things as cost per proof, or acceptable machine to machine tolerance based on average Delta E can be used to narrow down the range of choices for customers, along with the more obvious sales criteria such as price and speed.
DuPont sells proofing systems in the $13,300 to $47,500 price range to publishers, advertisers, packaging and commercial printers via resellers and direct. These various customer classes, and the requirements of their specific client bases, have different expectations for the various features of say Cromalin blue or Largo and the hybrid drop on demand Cromaprint, compared to its nearest competitors.
Away from core market Cromaprint seems like an odd departure for DuPont, away from its core market of colour management and proofing systems. Cromaprint is completely developed by DuPont and is positioned against engines from Vutek and Durst. The Cromaprint uses the same base front end technology as is used in DuPont’s proofing systems, which should give it a considerable colour management advantage. The printer is a 2.2 metre wide flat bed device based on piezo electric technology. It has 14 Spectra Galaxy heads to image 800 x 600 dpi and prints at a rate of up to 43 square metres per hour, making it suitable for a range of customers including point of sale, photofinishers, screen printers, sign printers and repro studios.
In many ways these companies face similar concerns to buyers of DuPont proofing technologies ranging from the obvious, such as the size of output, capital cost and quality based on ink type and gamut, through to the less obvious, such as output speed compared to quality and the heads used as well as white ink options. Since its introduction last April, DuPont has sold 11 Cromaprints in the UK, with another 45 in Europe and a total of 120 worldwide to these sectors and will introduce the new 18UV CMYK machine next year. These engines fit in the $190,000 to $266,000 price bracket, and although the top end of the superwide-format market is too crowded for DuPont, at the moment the company is watching it.
DuPont’s superwide-format printers are manufactured, to DuPont’s manufacturing specifications, by a subcontractor in China. This is another key advantage the company claims, in that it has taken years to get subcontractors to perform to the company’s specification. Years and lots of money have been invested to get the manufacturing accurate right down to the smallest detail.
The attraction of these superwide-format markets is in the oceans of ink they require, however there is still a healthy market for conventional proofing systems, which also consume a lot of ink. In both sectors costs per output is based on which inks are used, and at what the percentage they are laid down. DuPont are confident that their edge is in their inks and that the market for them will thrive for many years. And if the graphic arts industry tends more towards softproofing than hard, DuPont is uniquely positioned to meet that demand as well.
Digital printing has grown from being a strange and substandard alternative to offset, to being relevant for every form of physical communications. As we work out new and interesting ways of using digital print, we can expect the major players to continue to invest in technology development. DuPont is moving along with the rest of the market to capitalise on its expertise and on market expectations, in both proofing and digital presses.
Pictured above: Nottingham based large-format specialist, Viva Imaging, installed the UK’s first DuPont Cromaprint 22-UV, rigid and flexible large-format digital printer in February last year.
