Digital Without Compromise:

Why Paper Strategy Has Become Business Strategy

By Don Burns, Kodak

For the last 18 months or so, my job has been to make sure the three main elements of Kodak’s paper strategy came together to provide real support for the digital inkjet revolution that would be triggered by the launch of Kodak’s Stream Inkjet Technology.

Once we’d had a glimpse of what the Prosper 5000XL would be able to offer in the way of image quality, color, speed, and productivity, we knew this was the real digital printing press so many of our customers had been waiting for. Here, at last, was the machine that would allow offset jobs to be migrated onto digital without the need to compromise on quality, speed or cost.

But print exists only on a substrate. Once the job is done and the piece has left the print room – whether it’s a book, a catalog, a magazine or a piece of direct mail – speed and cost don’t show up. All the end user can see is its quality. Your customer’s customer just sees what’s on the paper. So the choice of papers available for use with the Prosper 5000XL was always going to be a key factor in the product’s success.

At its best, the Stream technology can produce stunning, vibrant color quality, with offset-class images at up to 175lpi. We wanted to be able to showcase that genuinely revolutionary inkjet image quality and show printers how it can be achieved in day-to-day business, starting with the right choice of paper.

Production inkjet paper grades have been produced for nearly 20 years and there are already several mills in North America, Europe, and Japan making papers that are well suited to the Stream technology. Our long term partners such as International Paper, Domtar, Glatfelter and CVG, to name a few, continue to work with us and already have robust technologies for Prosper presses. 

But we wanted to take the opportunity to recruit an elite group of world-leading manufacturers to develop new papers specifically optimized and tuned to the strengths of the Prosper platform as it expands into new printing applications for inkjet technology. So we are working with just a few expert companies to make this happen, in markets such as publishing and commercial print.

Several of these top paper makers are in the United States – Appleton Coated of Kimberley, WI, International Paper and Verso Paper Corp, both in Memphis, TN, NewPage of Miamisburg, OH, North Pacific Paper Corp. of Longview, WA, and Sappi Fine Paper North America of Boston, MA.

The overseas manufacturers are Mitsubishi Paper Mills and Nippon Paper Group in Tokyo, StoraEnso in Finland, and Ziegler Papier of Grellingen, in Switzerland, some of the finest paper companies in the world.

Together with Kodak, these mills are developing new coated and uncoated papers to bring out the best the Prosper 5000XL can offer in markets such as book printing, direct mail, catalogs, and magazine production. The results are already impressive, and they promise great things for the future, as developments in papermaking move ahead in step with the expected refinements of the new Stream technology over the next few years.

While printing with these new papers represents the pinnacle of image and color quality, we all know that the great bulk of the everyday business of printing is more concerned with finding acceptable trade-offs between cost and quality for individual jobs and customers. Simply being able to produce the superb short-run color samples that wowed visitors to Kodak’s stand at Ipex 2010 is not enough. So the second element of our new paper strategy has been to address the practical choices that have to be made from the vast range of existing papers.

These choices are to do with price, performance, and quality, but also to do with the hidden costs and complications of having to buy and store a very wide range of papers to support a busy commercial print business. To help with these vital business decisions, Kodak decided to invest in the most ambitious paper certification program this industry has seen.

We had looked at paper certification programs before, but they all seemed to work on a binary pass/fail basis, which meant they did not provide the kind of detailed relative assessments that would support smart decision-making. Many were less than objective, some support royalty schemes, and none, as you know, has ever broken through to become recognized as an industry standard and a routine business tool for printers.

We wanted to change that. We wanted to create a robust, comprehensive, transparent rating scheme that would assess paper stock according to the criteria that printers need to watch out for. We wanted a scale that would cover factors like optical density, strikethrough, mottle, and color-to-color bleed, and bring them together into a single four-diamond rating system to help printers make quick and informed decisions. In case one specific attribute was especially important for a particular job, we would back this up with the ability for the printer to drill down online and examine all the raw data behind the ratings to make detailed choices based on comparisons and trade-offs.

It is hard to overstate the difference this program could make to the way papers are chosen, or the business impact it could have. It will help printers to choose papers that are best suited to their projects and performance expectations, saving money, for example, by avoiding the need to over specify just in case something goes wrong. It can also help level the competitive playing field and eliminate the risk of a rival printer competing using bait and switch tactics.

It will take a lot of the guesswork and risk out of buying paper. It will simplify logistics and supply chain management and give printers the assurance that tested papers will perform as rated for specific applications. With so many possible combinations of paper, inkjet technologies and ink formulations available, this clear measurement of image quality and expected print performance will allow people to choose the right paper, quickly and consistently, and get the quality results they expect.

We all know commercial printers who use many different papers every day and keep or have easy access to many more – perhaps 100 or 150 – available at all times to ensure they have what their customers need. But the days of high margins for over-pleasing the customer are long gone. And today there are a lot of risks, if this approach means managing a huge portfolio of different stocks. Managing complexity can be costly.

The new paper certification program will go some way towards helping rationalize paper inventories. But the third element in Kodak’s paper strategy is a piece of equipment that tackles that issue directly.

The Prosper In-line Optimization Station, available from 2011, is an ingenious pre-treatment roll-coating module, designed to optimize almost any coated or uncoated paper for use with the Prosper 5000XL. It allows the new press to deliver exceptional quality and performance using standard offset papers as well as inkjet stocks.

For commercial printers handling large numbers of short-run jobs with different requirements and specifications, the advantages of using pre-treatment to cut the number of papers needed are obvious. But one of the most striking breakthroughs associated with Stream technology – with or without in-line optimization – is the way it provides the opportunity to think in terms of much longer runs.  

The Prosper 5000XL’s unique combination of speed and quality makes it the first digital press that can compete directly with offset for runs of, say, 7,000 or maybe even 10,000.

Bearing in mind that run lengths generally are becoming shorter, with fewer and fewer 50,000 runs, the ability to handle runs of 5,000 or 7,000 cost-effectively is going to be very important in winning new business. That is going to be a sweet spot for many types of commercial printing.

Recent history and some industry pundits usually posit that the digital crossover point is 2,000 items. With the launch of the Prosper press, Kodak has now raised the crossover threshold and more than doubled the effective run length that digital can tackle for color work. By paying close attention to the issues of paper strategy that will directly affect our customers’ profitability in these new circumstances, we are making sure they are well equipped to make the most of the great new opportunities on offer.

Let me know your opinions on Digital Without Compromise via the Prosper 5000XL and how it affects your business >>>

Donald J. Burns

Business Development Director - Media

Kodak's Graphic Communications Group

Donald J Burns, Business Development Director – Media, is responsible for the Strategic and Commercial relationships with media and substrate manufacturers for Kodak’s Graphic Communications Group. Don has over 25 years of Business Management and New Product Development in the Printing, Imaging and Packaging and Photographic markets. He has worked for ExxonMobil, Prism Polymers, and Eastman Kodak and has developed new products and technologies for almost every printing method from Inkjet to Intaglio in applications that range from candy bars to circuit boards. Don has a B.Sc. in Physics and Chemistry from McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario and an MBA from Simon School of Business Administration, Rochester, NY.