An OutputLinks Conversation with
Eric Owen
Worldwide VP Sales, Digital Printing Solutions
Eastman Kodak Company

Ian Shircore, OutputLinks’ UK Country Manager, had the opportunity to speak with Eric Owen recently about the Kodak Prosper 5000 and its effect on the business of print.

Ian Shircore: Eric, you have been deeply involved for months now in the launch of Kodak’s new flagship, the Prosper 5000XL. This is the digital press Antonio Perez introduced at Ipex as the machine that would “change print forever”. For that to happen, it would have to be able to compete with offset for a broad range of non-specialist print jobs, in ways we have never seen before. So how revolutionary is it? And is the world ready for the big leap forward?  

Eric Owen: The best electrophotographic devices – the NexPress, Indigo, iGen, and so on – are very high quality presses that can produce an image quality that’s certainly comparable with offset. But they’re slow and they’re expensive compared with inkjet. To get quality you sacrifice cost and productivity. On the other hand, inkjet can run very fast, but the image quality is certainly not going to be offset class. So you compromise on quality. Any way you look at it, existing technologies meant you had to compromise. You couldn’t have it all. Now you can. With the Kodak Prosper 5000XL, it’s digital without compromise. That’s what we set out to deliver and we’ve done it.

Ian: Surely people have heard big, ambitious claims before about how digital was going to take over the world. They’d be entitled to be a bit skeptical, wouldn’t they?

Eric: Certainly. And so they should be. They’ve seen the alternatives up to now and they know that they have always involved these trade-offs and compromises. The difference is that the Prosper 5000XL is something completely new. It’s a game-changer. It rewrites the rules in terms of quality, speed, and cost. And it’s able to do that because it uses a whole range of new technologies.

Ian: So it’s not just the way it forms and delivers the droplets of ink?

Eric: That’s a big part of it, and we can talk about that in a minute. But we’ve got at least two radical innovations in the ink itself, backed up by a number of patents developed at the Kodak Research Laboratories. For example, we’ve developed a new micro-milling process that produces extremely fine, smooth particles of colorant. We’ve also got a new and better way of suspending those micro-milled colorants in the ink, very evenly and very efficiently. So you get an even spread of colorant and a very high optical density, relative to the amount of ink you apply. In business terms, that means you get better color and use less ink, so our customers’ running costs come down straight away.

Ian: I hadn’t heard that mentioned before. I thought the emphasis was all on the print head technology.

Eric: The printhead technology is certainly what catches the eye, because it’s completely revolutionary. It lets the Prosper 5000XL run far faster than anything else that can begin to match its quality color printing.

Just to give you an idea, Kodak’s Stream technology delivers nearly perfect droplets of ink at 2.5 times the speed of other “fast” continuous inkjet systems and ten times the speed drop-on-demand can ever achieve. And that’s the theoretical top speed for DOD – about 40 kHz. In practice, DOD systems usually run at 25 kHz, so the difference is enormous.

The Stream print head forms droplets by heating the high-pressure stream of ink with tiny solid state heaters that flick on and off virtually instantly. Heating alters the surface tension, causing “kinks” in the ink stream and making it separate into droplets. The bigger, heavier drops land on the paper, where you want them, while the lighter drops are swept away to the side by a continuous airflow. It’s a great system. It works so much faster than earlier continuous inkjet systems, because they relied on a vibrating crystal to break up the ink stream and the solid state heaters react much faster. And the way the waste ink is simply blown away is more reliable and effective than the old idea of giving some of the droplets an electrical charge and deflecting them off towards a recycling bib. Ink is mostly water, and electricity and water is always a dubious combination. As soon as something goes wrong, you get short-outs. The charging stops functioning for that nozzle’s ink stream and you get a line of ink on the paper, as the system can’t deflect it.

Ian: So the Prosper 5000XL has a new printhead that lets it run fast and produce great image quality, and ink that’s engineered to give you more color for your buck…

Eric: …And other practical improvements, like a very short paper path. That means less opportunity for things to go wrong and less spoiled paper when there’s a roll change-out. We built our own transport, redesigning it from the ground up, to make sure the Prosper 5000XL was as robust as it is revolutionary.

Ian: OK. Turning to the market place, what has the reception been like? Aren’t people just a little bit worried about too much bleeding-edge technology in one package?

Eric: I think any doubts about the dangers of an untried inkjet technology have been quashed by the instant success of the Prosper S10 Imprinting System, which has already proved itself over tens of millions of pages. Since mid-2009, that has provided a great proof point for the Stream technology. People know it works, because it’s been working in a lot of different places for over a year. But the overall reception has been much as we expected. People are excited at the idea of “digital without compromise” and at the thought that there’s now a digital press they can use in an offset replacement role. But it does take them some time to get their heads round it.

I can understand that. In the past, every time they’ve thought about digital they’ve thought “OK, that’s low quality” or “That’s going to be really expensive” or “That’s a specialty thing, a niche thing.” People were used to the idea that high quality digital meant you had to have a specific client lined up, with a specific job that would justify printing at a cost that might be 10 or 12 times the cost of offset. So digital would be associated in their minds with things like photobooks. Every book is different, you can’t do it on offset and it’s a high value item, with a price that can easily justify a much higher print cost. But this is something else. The Kodak Prosper 5000XL is a full-blown printing press. They can use it to print virtually anything they’d print on their existing presses. Not just transactional billing, variable data, high speed, medium/low quality work. Not just books. Not just direct mail. Anything. Because the real four-color offset quality is there, the speed and productivity is there and the cost is right down there alongside traditional offset presses.

Ian: So when we saw Antonio Perez stand up at Ipex and say it would change print forever, he was talking about triggering the first major migration of the more run-of-the-mill print jobs to inkjet?

Eric: Partly, yes. But our customers are business people. They won’t change what they do because of some hype we generate. They’ll change because the technology is suddenly there to help them and because they can see for themselves the way the industry and the market are changing all around them. Lots of traditional markets and budgets are shrinking. Newspapers are down. Consumer willingness to receive direct mail is down. The value of direct marketing budgets is diminishing and individual pieces are getting smaller.

No-one can afford to stand still and do nothing. But here is a way forward that makes sense in straight business terms. Kodak has used its experience and lab power to invent answers to today’s problems, creating new technologies that are different and unique and that open up new possibilities.

Now you can migrate offset work onto digital on a cost basis that is the same or better, with no compromise on quality. So you can run, say, 6,000 books out on it and your cost is the same as using offset. That means this press is justified simply by its ability to handle the work you have migrated. But you’re not using the advantages of digital yet. And now, having covered your costs already, you can start to take advantage of the digital technology to increase top-line value.

That’s something that hasn’t happened in this business for a long time.

You include some element of variability and that drives a higher value to the end customers, so you can charge more and your customers are happy to pay it. Remember, printing variable data doesn’t add to running costs at all. You can upsell, while keeping your running costs the same.

Printers can look forward to margin expansion, rather than the contraction we’ve all had to get used to.

If you think creatively about it, almost anything that’s printed can benefit from the extra relevance you can achieve with variable elements.

Almost anything can be made more targeted and topical – direct marketing pieces, catalogues, magazines, newspapers, brochures, flyers. But there’s always been that compromise. You either had to pay an enormous price to print each piece, and accept that it would be really slow, or you’d struggle to get the quality needed to service your market. Now, for the first time, the Prosper 5000XL and Kodak’s Stream technology mean you really can have it all.  

Eric Owen
Worldwide VP Sales, Digital Printing Solutions
Eastman Kodak Company
 

Eric Owen was named Vice President of Sales for Kodak’s Commercial Digital Printing Solutions group in May 2010.  Mr. Owen is in his 16^th year at Kodak and has worked in virtually every area of our Business to Business Graphics Communication Group.  His previous position as Vice President of Market Development had a strong focus on the early market awareness and client engagements for the Kodak Prosper Press, a Stream Inkjet Technology product. In November 2007, Mr. Owen was named Manager, Photo Services for Kodak’s Graphic Communcations Group.  He previously held the position of Global Account Manager for Kodak, and the former Creo Americas and CreoScitex America. Mr. Owen has more than 20 years of experience in sales and marketing and has been very involved with various organizations including SGAUA where he held a Board position.  Mr. Owen has been a frequent speaker and occasional columnist for various prepress and technology-oriented trade events and publications including Pre-Magazine, Catalog Age, MacWorld, MacWeek, Vue/Point and Seybold.  His expansive background includes expert level understanding of traditional and digital print solutions, photographic market solutions, and Prepress systems from an operational and business growth focus. Mr. Owen attended both the United States Merchant Marine Academy and Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University where he majored in Engineering.