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Simon Plumtree
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The Technical Wide Format Market: Evolution or Revolution?

A Conversation with BLI’s Wide Format Guru, Joe Tischner

Dec 9, 2015 11:22:28 AM


There have been a number of important announcements recently about new developments and products in the technical wide format (WF) printer space, so I took the opportunity to ask BLI’s Joe Tischner, who heads up our testing of these devices, how he’s seen the market evolve in recent times and how it may develop in the future.

Simon: How do you think the technical end of the wide format spectrum has evolved recently?

Joe: The lifecycle of technical wide format devices is shrinking year on year as vendors strive to keep up with the trend towards cloud and mobile working. While each new generation may boast faster speeds, new ink formulations that deliver better output and more ergonomic designs, cloud and mobile capabilities are producing the key marketing soundbites. The omnipresent ‘cloud’ is playing a huge role in technical printing with online project collaboration and file sharing now commonplace, and it is revolutionizing large architectural, engineering and construction (AEC) projects. In years gone by, as plans changed, new schematics would have been drafted and printed at the architect’s or city planner’s office. These were printed on expensive high-speed production wide format devices, and the new sets of plans were distributed to the contractors, subcontractors and other parties via courier. Now, courtesy of the cloud, this process can be streamlined with the updated files posted in the project folder, automated alerts sent to all parties and new plans printed on site via a PC or tablet in real time.

Multifunction wide format printers are also growing in popularity. Handwritten feedback and comments on plans from on-site contractors and architects can be fed back easily to the project team in real time via scan-to-cloud functionality, which is far more preferable than communicating changes over the phone (which runs the risk of misinterpretation), or in hardcopy format via costly couriers or snail mail. Canon and HP dominate this space with Epson continuing to grow market share since it introduced its first series of four-color wide format devices a few years ago.

Simon: Scanning these big plan documents must be challenging, especially if you want to send a scan to an email address. How are vendors handling this?

Joe: Very good question and, yes, you are correct. A large A1 or A0 plan scanned in full-color mode can create a very large file that would fall foul of virtually all email servers. Large files are also challenging for the potentially low-quality internet bandwidth available at the building site. There are ways around this issue, however. Many devices now include a direct scan to USB capability so plans can be directly scanned on to flash drives, allowing for fast transmission to a mobile worker’s laptop without the bottleneck of the internet. Canon offers an Index 8-bit color scanning mode, which means that scanned documents with some color content, such as wiring plans, handwritten notes or highlighter markups, retain their color integrity but only use a maximum of 256 colors. This means the Index 8-bit color scanning mode is capable of creating manageable file sizes compared to the prohibitively large files created when scanning in full-color 24-bit mode, which can differentiate over 16 million colors. HP has just launched a new series of AEC devices and they now include WiFi Direct, which means that a private WiFi network can be created by the device. This allows a mobile worker to connect their laptop to the device directly, without going through a router, and benefit from a great deal of convenience and potentially faster data transmission.

Simon: So how important is image quality in the technical printer market?

Joe: Very important. While great image quality is nice to have for most of us in general office environments, it’s absolutely key in AEC where a missing line or full stop could be very costly if picked up late in the process, or, worse still, if it results in a dangerous construction. Architectural drawings and engineering blueprints were typically printed in black and white as multi-layer schematics with building, wiring and plumbing and so on printed on separate sheets. However, with a multitude of low-cost, four- or five-color inkjet devices now on the market, color AEC printing is much more commonplace, and it allows easy viewing of the multiple layers of a design or building on a single sheet. Of course, Geographical Information Systems (GIS) output and other map printing tasks used by city planners or companies prospecting for oil or gas, need to be printed in color and require smooth coverage of large areas, good color matching and accurate fine detail. Also, while they are not designed primarily for graphic-intensive work, we have seen very high-quality output being generated by these four- or five-color devices on coated media that could easily pass for point-of-sale and other indoor display content. Epson even promotes the UltraChrome XD pigment-based Ink used in its SC-T series of technical printers as being smudge-, crease- and water-resistant and suitable for short-term outdoor use.

Epson’s UltraChrome XD pigment-based ink, which is used in its SC-T series such as the SC-T7200D, is smudge- crease- and water-resistant.

Simon: You mention four or five colors, what is the fifth color?

Joe: Some HP technical printer models offer grey as a fifth ‘color’, making their greyscale output more neutral and ‘true’ than with some rival devices, which use a composite of black and CMY to create halftones that can leave grey fills with a slight magenta or cyan hue.

Simon: I guess another important decision is whether to choose a single-roll model or a dual-roll design?

Joe: Yes, in environments which print predominantly from media rolls rather than cut-sheet media, it’s very handy to be able to switch between different media types or sizes without the hassle of having to reload the media roll each time. It also allows for longer uninterrupted printing without the need for a paper roll replacement. Indeed, many production four-color devices, such as the new HP PageWide series, support up to four or six rolls.

Simon: Productivity must be a significant factor too?

Joe: Yes, but it depends on the environment and tasks that need to be performed and where the performance measurement is deemed to have started. Do you start assessing productivity when print is selected at the desktop or when the green button is pressed on the device? This will give a measure of the device’s ability to handle the arriving job, but does not take into account the amount of time required by the architect, contractor or town planner before they can get to the ‘Send’ stage. Productivity is one of the most complex aspects of analysis of these devices and is always going to involve a level of subjectivity and personal preference. What I would suggest is to put together a list of the common tasks that you would be looking to do on a regular basis, try them out on the devices you are considering and get a feel yourself for which you like the most, like test driving your new car.

Simon: How about size and weight?

Joe: If you have an office where space is constrained, as is true in most big cities, this would definitely be one factor – these models have a pretty big overall footprint and can be difficult to move if you need to load paper at the back of the device. A flat surface can be a useful feature, as it allows for a quick review of the printout before returning to your desk. When printing large volumes of documents the HP rear stacker unit is certainly a big plus on some of its devices, as it keeps output neat yet has minimal impact on footprint.

Simon: HP boldly predicts that its PageWide technology will disrupt this market and calls its HP PageWide XL 8000 model “the fastest large-format monochrome and color printer ever.” How do you see PageWide affecting the technical wide format market?

HP’s PageWide XL 8000 uses a static printhead to produce high volume prints at very high speed.

Joe: Only time will tell how HP’s PageWide technology will be received in the marketplace. We’ve seen it on the show floors at both Graph Expo and SGIA and it looks like it has great potential, especially for high-volume shops. PageWide technology uses over 200,000 nozzles on a stationary print bar that spans the full width of the printed page. In contrast to printheads on traditional wide-format devices that whizz across the pages on which they’re printing and use fewer nozzles, PageWide printheads should, according to HP, deliver “high-quality prints at faster speeds and lower costs.” Of course, we won’t know if that’s true or not until we’ve tested one.

Simon: I can understand that a fixed print bar allows much faster print speeds without any loss in image quality, as paper is the only moving part, but doesn’t this also require a corresponding advance in ink technology?

Joe: Yes, according to HP, “the PageWide printhead is built with thousands of identical drop generators that offer uniform volume, speed and trajectory for precise printing. The technology also regulates the speed and penetration of Original HP pigment ink to accelerate drying and control drop size, feathering and color-to-color bleed for high-quality prints.”

I’d really welcome the opportunity to evaluate one of these in our lab so we could determine how big a disruptor the new technology is!

Simon: Hasn’t a similar design approach been adopted in other recent models from Xerox and Océ?

Joe: Similar, yes. The Xerox Wide Format IJP 2000 uses five printheads, each containing 70,400 nozzles with a fine 1.3-picoliter droplet size; these stationary printheads enable media to be passed under them at six inches per second. The Océ ColorWave 810 and 910 (successor to the 900) uses the same number of five printheads and the same 320,000 nozzles and a 1.2-picoliter droplet size. Océ claims “speeds of up to 1000m2 per hour regardless of image complexity, ink coverage or media type.”

The Xerox Wide Format IJP 2000 uses five static printheads, in what seems to be the new trend among wide format printers.

Simon: Will this new technology revolutionize (or “disrupt”) the market?

Joe: It is certainly going to put huge pressure on the monochrome toner-based technical printer vendors, but how prevalent these devices become, well, the jury’s still out.