Magazine" Inkjet Technology to Dominate Drupa

BoSacks Speaks Out" The following paragraph caught my eye and I thought it was worth passing on:

"It's the first time we have seen continuous inkjet in the category of glossy media and catalogues," Kodak chief technical officer Bill Lloyd told reporters.

This seems to me to the logical next step in printing magazines. It is an enormous opportunity to personalize edit to individual readers. It gives any publisher the ability to have multiple niches within a single long press run.

"Science, my lad, is made up of mistakes, but they are mistakes which it is useful to make, because they lead little by little to the truth."
- Jules Verne

"Magazine" Inkjet Technology to Dominate Drupa
BY Barney Cox, PrintWeek,
http://www.printweek.com/drupa/news/778768/Inkjet-technology-dominate-Drupa-Kodak-Xerox-launches/

Drupa 2008 is set to live up to its billing as 'the inkjet Drupa' after both Kodak and Xerox revealed plans to show new inkjet technologies. Both firms have pledged to reveal new high-speed inkjet technology at the Düsseldorf event, although the two have widely diverging views on the potential applications for the technology. Kodak has revealed plans to commercialise its Stream technology, un­­veiled at last week's pre-Drupa media week, within two years and claims it offers "offset class" performance that will transform the industry.
"It's the first time we have seen continuous inkjet in the category of glossy media and catalogues," Kodak chief technical officer Bill Lloyd told reporters.

Kodak predicts that a trillion pages per year, which is the equivalent of 1% of the world's printed pages, will be produced using Stream technology by 2015.

At Drupa, Stream will be shown as a one-up, 150m per minute concept press and the firm plans to begin selling products based on the technology by 2010.

Xerox's approach to inkjet development is more cautious. The firm has suggested inkjet will be a niche technology, despite having registered more than 1,200 patents for inkjet technology developments.
"We believe inkjet has its place and is suitable for very high volumes," said Xerox production systems group vice president of marketing Valerie Blauvelt. "People have high-quality applications inkjet is not suitable for. These include direct mail and transactional."

Blauvelt described Xerox as "not a single technology company" and added the firm was going to continue to develop products based on xerography and solid ink.

The firm used last week's conference to launch two new machines, the 490/980 colour continuous feed printers and the 650/1300 continuous feed printers.