Kodak's Duncan Newton

Duncan Newton, Kodak - Digital Without Compromise: the Answer is “Yes”

By Duncan Newton, Eastman Kodak, Application & Business Development, Asia Pacific

It’s interesting the difference it makes when someone like me is trying to introduce new technology to someone who does not have English as his or her first language. I’m based in Shanghai, but my responsibilities stretch from the Pacific islands to Pakistan, embracing half the world’s population and so many languages even the academics lose count.

Since many of my business contacts have limited English vocabularies and I have little or no knowledge of their language, I can’t impress them with complex, copywriter-honed marketing-speak. I just have to show them what Kodak technology has to offer, give them a few relevant numbers and then stand back and let them see for themselves.

Introducing Kodak Prosper 5000XL

Which is why I have been having so much fun introducing people across this vast territory to the Kodak Prosper 5000XL. Because, to a large extent, its “digital without compromise” value proposition speaks for itself.

Printers know what they are looking for. They see the image quality and the color, nod and grunt, and get out their loupes to take a closer look. You see the smiles breaking through and you pick up the odd word of English that seems to be used everywhere.  “Offset?” you hear them ask since they have not seen dot shapes like this from inkjet before - and they are impressed.

Color Quality

You show them the Prosper 5000XL in action, running at a rate that would deliver 7 miles of 24.5 inch color quality, on coated or uncoated paper, every hour.

Then the questions start:

What are the economics of handling high-volume transpromo work in color, compared with black and white?

What about short-run books and print-on-demand work?

Where are the cost crossover thresholds in general commercial printing, as compared with offset?

How realistic is the potential duty cycle of 120 million pages a month?

Wherever you are in the world, these are the kind of business questions every printer needs to consider.

Four-Color Inkjet

Those who are thinking of racing to the front of the line, like the Australian, Japanese, and Korean customers who have already bought or signed letters of intent for the Prosper, don’t need much prompting to grasp the potential of a fast high-quality four-color inkjet machine that can match offset running costs.

Those who are just looking – who may not currently be in a position to invest in this transformational technology – are equally keen to hear the answers, because of their need to anticipate the direct competitive threats that will arise in their market areas.

Across the breadth of Asia there is the most extraordinary variety of equipment in use, from the hundred-year-old offset machines I’ve seen in the Philippines to the highly automated, capital intensive systems the leading Indian print companies have invested in.

Stream Inkjet Technology

Printers have a variety of ingenious and unexpected business models. They also have a number of approaches measuring the capital and labor investment trade-offs. But there is no doubt that the Prosper 5000XL and the color Stream Inkjet Technology it brings with it will trigger or accelerate change in many different territories and many different market niches.

The sheer versatility of a press that can tackle books and catalogs, magazines and direct mail is important – especially when it can do all these things with offset-like quality at offset-like costs.

Regaining Competitive Advantage

Traditional commercial printers in every country are being squeezed by aggressive providers emphasizing volume, throughput and low unit costs, or by companies that focus on flexibility and smaller, specialized jobs with a high customer service component. A Prosper 5000XL could let these companies regain the competitive advantage by migrating projects from offset, without paying a cost premium, while exploring and exploiting the added-value potential of variable data.

The world has only scratched the surface of what can be done to target, personalize, and tune printed material using variable data. We have seen how transpromo techniques applied to bills and statements have allowed utilities and financial services companies to improve response and boost customer loyalty. What we haven’t seen yet – except in some small experiments – is the one-person newspaper or the intelligent catalog that edits itself to reflect my choices, preferences, and past purchases. They will come very soon. 

There’s almost nothing printed on paper that can’t be made more specific and relevant through the use of variable data. And that doesn’t only apply to marketing activities and the pampered consumer markets of the most developed countries. I can easily imagine regional governments using variable data techniques in Indonesia, which has 600 languages, or India, which has 800, to help ensure that ethnic and rural communities do not feel sidelined or isolated. 

The size and diversity of the Asia Pacific region always makes generalizations suspect but I have watched the immediate enthusiasm the Prosper 5000XL has generated and it is pretty clear to me what my customers see in it.

• They see a real, all-round printing press, capable of running alongside offset in some companies or replacing it completely in others.
• They see the flexibility to respond to changing business environments and market demands, coupled with great productivity, superb color quality, and running costs that make sound business sense.

From Australia and India to China, Japan and Korea, the industry’s leaders are reshaping their plans in the light of a new concept – digital without compromise. 

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

Duncan Newton, Kodak. A Balance Shift - Offset Print & the Prosper 5000XL

I was in the Philippine national printing office in Manila the other day looking at one of the older offset machines they were using there. It was loud and slow and clunky, but it had every right to be. That machine was made in the early 1900s. It’s a museum piece, but it’s still in regular use. And it made me think again about the continuing battle between offset and digital printing.

I used to talk about digital inkjet technology and use the phrase “offset replacement”. Then I adjusted my stance and started calling the technology “offset complementary”. Now I’ve gone back to thinking in terms of “offset replacement” again. I may flip-flop on this again one day. But the real point is that – as things have stood up to now – both technologies have had real inherent strengths and advantages.

Offset presses were designed to produce a lot of printed pages in a very short time, and to do it as cheaply as possible. They’ve been fast and inexpensive and produced very high quality. And digital hasn’t been able to match this, in the past. 

So the challenge for the digital people has always been “What is it we can do that the offset printers can't do?” That has meant focusing on short runs, variable data, photobooks, and so on, and avoiding head-on confrontation with offset technology. By defining those business niches, it has always been possible to dance in front of the bulls and not be gored.

• But offset is a fully developed technology.
• Digital inkjet is young and still developing.

So when we get a breakthrough like Kodak’s Prosper 5000XL, we know that the combination of offset-class image quality and high speed it offers is not the end of the line. There is plenty of headroom to develop the Stream inkjet technology further. Yet what we have already is clearly a game-changer.

Suddenly, there’s a color inkjet machine that is fast and good-looking and cheap to run, without the trade-offs we’ve had to put up with in the past. We call that “digital without compromise”.

From where I sit – which, these days, usually seems to be roughly 35,000 feet above either the Pacific or the Indian Ocean – it seems obvious that inkjet and offset will be working side-by-side for some years to come. I see inkjet allowing offset presses to focus on doing what they do best, while creating a viable alternative for the things to which offset is not well suited.

In the longer term, though, the writing’s on the wall.

In China, the government has ordered every public sector printing operation to start evaluating and adopting digital, and imposed a five-year deadline.

You can see why. Run lengths are down there, too, and I’ve even been told about efforts they had been making to do print-on-demand using existing offset equipment. That’s not something I’d wish to embark on, but it underlines that shifting requirements like print-on-demand are creating more awareness of the value of digital inkjet.

And if China is all-digital in five or even ten years’ time, where’s that going to leave the rest of the world if we don’t follow suit?

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

Duncan Newton, Kodak. Instant Classics Books on Demand & Prosper 5000XL

It’s often just a tiny thing that tells you the world has changed.

A friend of mine in the UK went into a small-town book store recently, in search of a virtually unknown novel, Dr Wortle’s School, by Anthony Trollope. I never read Trollope, but I guess people may have heard of one or two of his books – maybe. There was no copy in the shop, but my friend ordered the book and was told it would be there in three working days.

The next Wednesday my friend picked up her pristine paperback copy of the novel. “First published 1881” it said on the title page. But on the back page was another note: “Printed 16 August 2010.” She was stunned to realize that her own copy of this 130-year-old obscurity had been specially printed to order, for her, that Monday morning.

Now I don’t know how many people will be reading Dr Wortle’s School this year, but it won’t make the shelves of many local book stores. The publisher would be crazy to print even a short run, place the books in a warehouse, and hope they’d sell. That would eat up space and cash flow with no guarantee of any return.

On the other hand, there is clearly room in this out-of-copyright novel’s £6 price for both the publisher and the book store to make a modest profit, thanks to the wonders of digital inkjet printing.

I don’t know if this particular book – which was crisply and cleanly printed, with an attractive high-gloss four-color cover – was produced on a Prosper press. But I do know that the unrivalled offset-class quality, speed, and flexibility of the Prosper 5000XL means that many thousands of one-off orders like this will be successfully and profitably handled on an on-demand basis in the next few years.

No one has spelled it out yet, but I think the phrase “digital without compromise” that is associated with the Prosper 5000XL has just made the phrase “out of print” disappear from the dictionary. 

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

Duncan Newton, Kodak – Where There’s a Bill, There’s a Way

I’ve been thinking about the speed of change we’re seeing right now. It’s so fast; we’ve got overlapping waves of change going on that sometimes even contradict each other.

For example, there are new customers turning on to the potential of transpromo all the time. That’s not surprising. The economics are strong, the case studies are convincing, and the technology just got a whole lot better, with the launch of Kodak’s Prosper 5000XL and its uncompromisingly fast offset-quality which we call “digital without compromise”.

Yet this is happening at a time when the total number of clicks being generated for transactional documents is collapsing. No one under 30 seems to want their bills printed on paper. Banks and utilities are falling over themselves to persuade account holders to click the box for online billing – partly because they want to reduce landfill and save the world, but mostly because they feel it will cut their costs.

Extend that trend far enough and there may be no paper bills and statements left to carry our superbly relevant, neatly targeted messages. Perhaps in ten years, perhaps in 20. Perhaps never.

In the meantime, though, transpromo gets better and better.

The most powerful thing about the Prosper 5000XL, of course, is the beautiful color it generates. When you can deliver beautiful color at a price that's roughly comparable to what black and white used to cost just a few years ago, you have a transformational technology. Where you used to spend two cents to print a black and white bill, you can now transform that, for the same cost, into a real vehicle for vivid color communication.

For most insurers, banks, and utilities, the main method of talking to customers is a bill or a statement. But they want to say more than “This is what you owe us” or “This is how much you paid”, so they produce blow-ins or stuffers that they throw into the envelope. The problem is they those stuffers or inserts are not related to the person. You get the same thing in your envelope that I get in mine. The insurance company treats us all like we drive cars, even though I don't have a car. They just put the same thing in every envelope.

That has to change, and that’s why transpromo is gaining traction. Not just because it makes my printed document pretty, but because it makes it more efficient. Since customers only get information that's pertinent to them, response rates go up.

I get a triple whammy. I have a more persuasive way of talking to my customer base – and, as everyone knows, it costs many times more to get a new customer than to keep an old one.

• From a green standpoint, I throw less paper away.
• From a marketing standpoint, I have a more effective message that's going out to the right people.
• And from a financial standpoint, it needn't cost me a cent more to do that.

As the software companies have already recognized, there’s no reason why the techniques of transpromo shouldn’t transfer to online media equally effectively. For now, though, in a world that still generates tens of millions of paper bills every day, companies should do what they can with what they’ve got. Talk to the people that know them and earn more of their spending power.

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

Duncan Newton, Kodak – A Warm Asia Pacific & Prosper 5000XL Welcome

I’m based in Shanghai China these days, though my territory covers dozens of countries and hundreds of languages and cultures, from Japan to Australia and India to Indonesia. It gives you a different perspective, being so far from the United States and it’s quite good for keeping your feet on the ground.

So while I have been as excited as anyone else about the launch of the Prosper 5000XL, it has been particularly interesting to watch the reaction to the new press across the Asia Pacific region.

Chinese printers, for example, were pretty sure they knew what to expect from the next generation of inkjet printers. They expected speed and productivity but they didn’t expect the quality of the Prosper. Out came the loupes, as they pored over the Prosper’s dot shapes and color. And after careful examination, they declared them way beyond what they’d hoped for. Because, of course, printers everywhere love dots – and ours are really good.

After that experience, I bought myself the best sales tool I’ve ever had. It’s a 150x digital microscope and I carry it everywhere now, so that everyone who cares about great dots can take a really close look. If you’ve got something that truly stands up to scrutiny like this, you might as well encourage it.

It’s not just the Chinese printers who are getting excited, though. In India, where printing is now a very advanced, high-volume, high-tech affair, people have been noting all the little details that go to make the Prosper 5000XL a tool that can create new business opportunities.

They like the speed, of course – 650 feet per minute is hard to argue with. But they have also picked up on the big print width of up to 24.5 inches, the consistency that comes from Kodak’s automated Image Quality Management System and the potential duty cycle of 120 million pages a month.     

Across the region, the reaction has been great. We have buyers lined up in Australia and Japan and we’ve already seen serious interest from Korea, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, as well as India and China. Many of these markets were relatively untouched by the recession, so buyers have the money to invest and the confidence to plan ahead for future growth. 

Back in the US and Europe, people are feeling more battered and budgets are still tight. But we can’t let the misery of the last year or two overshadow our forward planning.

Asia Pacific will be quick to capture the benefits of the Prosper 5000XL and the new technologies that drive it. It would be a painful irony if the US and Europe got left behind.

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

An OutputLinks Conversation With Duncan Newton

 

Manager, Application & Business Development, Asia Pacific

 

Eastman Kodak Company

Ian Shircore, OutputLinks’ UK Country Manager, had the opportunity to speak with Duncan Newton recently about the Kodak Prosper 5000 and its effect on the business of print from China to New Zealand and from Pakistan to the Philippines.