A Suitable Case for Treatment
Posted on Mon, Sep 13, 2010 @ 08:00 AM
by Don Burns
To run a profitable printing business these days, you need the right skills, the right people, the right equipment, and the right business model.
I know printers who have staked their whole future on doing one kind of work and doing it well. Their focus is on throughput and productivity, operational excellence and ruthless efficiency.
They won’t chase marginal business and they won’t be lured into areas where they don’t have clear competitive advantages. So they’ll normally buy just two or three papers. They buy in bulk and get good deals from all their suppliers.
I know others whose approach is just the opposite. They’re not about economies of scale. With them, it’s all customer intimacy and flexible, personal service. Whatever paper the customer wants, they’ll have it or get it within hours, no problem. If that means working with a hundred different papers in the course of a year, that’s how they keep their customers coming back.
But we all know there are plenty of other printers who kind of fall in the middle. Not big and focused enough to rely on economies of scale, but not secure enough in a specialist service niche to meet the customer’s every whim. For them, the Prosper In-Line Optimization Station could be a really important part of Kodak’s new offering. Coupled with the quality and productivity of the Prosper 5000XL inkjet press, this optional, affordable module means they can get great results from different types and grades of paper.
The in-line module is built around a robust roll coating technology that allows the use of a wide range of water-based pre-treatment fluids, with different chemistries, viscosities and coat weights. Pre-treatment can be applied to all kinds of different paper surfaces, coated or uncoated, matte, silk, or glossy. Yet, from what I’ve seen of the results, it looks as if just four fluids will do the job for almost every paper.
I think this is really significant, in business terms, as it will let printers use the widest possible range of standard offset and commercial inkjet papers. It’s not the most glamorous side of the Prosper revolution, but in-line optimization is going to help a lot of Kodak customers compete and win profitable business, without having to invest in a warehouse full of different papers.
With the right fluid formulation, roll coating can be used successfully to treat almost any stock, including the papers you’d use for catalogs and magazines. And if you want my guess for the future, I expect we will even be treating non-porous, non-paper surfaces, as used in packaging and labels. That really would be broadening the business base for a lot of commercial printers.