In the last year, printing heavyweights RR Donnelley and Transcontinental have both updated vital facilities with multiple VaryPress machines from Nipson Digital Printing Systems. The technology is based on magnetography, which uses a magnetic print drum and a magnetizing printhead array, combined with flash toner fusing that only heats the toner – not the paper.

Overshadowed by other toner giants using electrophotography, and big strides in inkjet, magnetography offers another option that will eat into offset production process. PrintAction spoke with Nipson’s North American president Robert Stabler about the future of this 15-year-old technology emerging from Europe.

Jon Robinson: With your R&D and production in France, is VaryPress magnetography more prevalent in Europe than North America?

Robert Stabler: If you look at the history of Nipson, just as IBM is in the printing space because it needed a technology to print out statements from mainframe computers back in the 80s and 90s, Nipson evolved out of Bull – the French computer mainframe company. So in the transactional space we are very strong in Europe and Asia.

Where is your opportunity in North America?

Direct mail and transactional is a very large market for us. Then we have what we call security printing, which could be any kind of form or label maybe with some form of mica [printing] on it. And all of our printers are 100 percent mica-capable. You do not need special toner to print mica because it is a magnetic technology. The other very, very large emerging market for us is the book-on-demand and print-on-demand market.

What is VaryPress’ architecture?

We basically market two units. We have a VaryPress 400 that currently runs at 415 linear feet per minute, so obviously running 2-up. It has a printable area of about 18 inches and a maximum web width of 20, so like a 2-up print engine. Certainly among toner-based systems it is by far the fastest unit on the market. We have announced that by the end of the first quarter next year we will have a unit running at 500 linear feet.
We also have a product called the 200, which has a maximum rated speed of 290 feet. The 200 has its own internal transport system and that is more akin to a copier, but it is roll fed and it is very fast. 

Do you need to do more of a big marketing push to get the Nipson name out there with more printers?

We are not Xerox. I would love it if we were but we are not and where we focus is where we believe we can really add value to customers. Now obviously if somebody comes to us who has six DocuTechs and is looking to go continuous then we have a very good story to tell. But do we think that we have the sales and marketing muscle to really get to all of those players cost effectively? Probably not is the obvious answer. That is why we have a very strong distributor network. Ernest Green is our distributor in Canada.

Where does the production power of Nipson fit, when book supply chains are being pushed closer to one-off markets with technology like Google Books?

I think the one-off book market is going to grow, no doubt, and we can absolutely play in that market, but that is not where the volume is today in books. Publishers make or lose money in book printing by how they manage inventory. Industry studies say that there is 18 months of inventory in the book supply chain and what digital printing enables a book printer to do is to just reduce that dramatically. Hardcover books really haven’t taken off digitally yet because of the lack of good hardcover [finishing] solutions.

How do you compare with technology like Xeikon’s, which is also very interested in the book-on-demand market?

They do covers. That is the major area that they have done up until now. I do not know how quick they are to do cost-effective books. I guess the educational market might be, if it is a $500 book and it is a short run. Our play in the book market is if you are a publisher and you have a new title but are not sure what the take up is going to be and you want to test market it with 500 or 600 copies, or indeed if you need a reprint of a book.

As more work moves toward short runs, why is VaryPress speed still relevant?

The 400 is a tight-web device, which means that it has no internal paper transport in it, and where that really scores is if you want to put it inline with some other finishing equipment or indeed even a press. And of course 500 feet a minute gets us right around the same speed of the fastest flexo presses on the market. So anybody that wants to put down static colour and variable data black on the fly, and go from roll to finished product, then that is going to be a very productive fit.

What about colour for you? Is that a concern for the future?

We have colour projects running in our R&D. We have some customers that have done some spot colours with an inkjet on the front end. We are a long way off from producing good-quality [transactional] colour images with our technology.

With its AFP efforts, IBM is seriously looking at colour for transactional printing. Is the market ready?

The market is going to decide. I see in the States that there is a little bit of traction. Everybody tends to talk about markets like they are all going 100 percent in one direction – who is going to be the winner and who is going to be the loser. The vast majority of statement printing in the future is going to remain black and white, variable data, just because of cost issues. But one could envision that somebody puts down colour for a first page, or for specific areas, and then the rest is black and white. We see people looking at a lot of different substrates because of postal rates and postal reforms, which actually plays to us as well because we print on just about anything.

VaryPress prints on foils and plastics, but that also seems to be the lure of inkjet. Is inkjet a major threat to Nipson?

You have to see what inkjet can do and what inkjet cannot do. On single pass, high-speed inkjet printing, I would say there is still a big limitation on the number of substrates that you can run on – absolutely – because you get bleed.

I absolutely think inkjet will grow but if I were to paint a rich picture of where I see the different technologies evolving, I think all of the digital technologies will grow. We have our sweet spot in the market on productivity. I am convinced that Kodak continuous inkjet will continue to grow. I am convinced that some of the colour electrophotography for office applications and short-run cut-sheet will continue to grow.  I think the net loser in the game is, obviously, offset.

Where does electrophotography become a printing problem?

It a big issue for anything that needs to go into any binding equipment or inserting equipment, because the characteristics of the paper have changed. I don’t know whether you have seen a pile on the copier in the office and it looks a little bit wavy. That is what you get. One of the things with books and our technology is the fact that it lays flat, so the bound books look like it has come off of an offset press.

Is Nipson the only player in magnetography?

Absolutely. It is a patented technology so people would have to work hard to get around some of the patents. Some people have looked at it in the past and thought about it. But most companies are not very good at multiple technologies. Xerox is electrophotography; Kodak is continuous inkjet in this space. IBM has picked electrophotography. I don’t see new entrants coming in for this technology. With HP in the long term it is all about inkjet.

How is Nipson evolving its printheads?

We announced our new printheads last year but now we are really showing it. It is a whole new head technology and we also have a new drum and toner technology associated with it as well. It allows us to put down a much, much smaller dot, in essence. So although it is still 600 dpi, it is 600 dpi with a very high quality – very uniform halftone quality.

Where will you take the speed of the VaryPress?

The limitations of the speed in our technology are actually the ability that we have to control the toner. If you imagine something running at 500 linear feet, you have to get a lot of toner out of a toner box onto a drum, get it erased off of a drum, and have no toner flying around. Those are the technological challenges that we have, but the speed will continue to get faster.

One of the step changes is the compatibility with a flexo press. The next step change will be that we get up to 600, 700 feet a minute and then you are going to have really highly automated lines in place.

How does RFID change your future?

One thing for sure is that you need to have something that isn’t RFID on a package because RFID will have a failure rate. You are always going to need some kind of visual printed identification. I believe that RFID is absolutely going to happen. I just think it is a matter of time before the cost comes down enough and the reliability goes up.

Transcontinental put in six VaryPress machines this year. What has that market awareness meant for Nipson?

We have a lot of blue chip names attached to us. RR Donnelley has put in a second line down in their Harrisburg, Virginia, plant. [In addition to its first six VaryPress 200s], Transcontinental has put in another eight, so they have put in 14 presses in total – all in Philadelphia. It is a huge facility. You are probably aware that Transcontinental has decided its growth in the United States is going to be in the direct mail segment.