Though Delphax was vague on many of Elan's details in advance of the show - including pricing and availability - it did say the presses will incorporate multiple printheads from San Diego, CA-based Memjet that can deliver speeds up to 500 impressions per minute in full color and 1600dpi print quality on a number of different substrates and sheet sizes.

In an interview with PrintWeek, Delphax President and CEO Dieter Schilling said the decision to shift the company toward color digital was made about four or five years ago. "Our company was built on the check industry and we decided we needed to look around and figure out how we were going to survive the print industry" he added. "We were looking for technology that was ahead of the curve and that's when we ran into Memjet - we started negotiation and ended up with a supply agreement that gets us where we are today."

By combining fast turnaround and short set-up time between jobs, with ability generate high-quality full color in text or image, Delphax predicted elan will be  ideal for commercial print-on-demand applications in direct mail, transpromo and billing, as well as book and manual publishing and security printing.

High-speed color digital has become a crowded space and Schilling suggested the financial troubles of some color digital press providers is bound to change the competitive landscape, though he added that hasn't happened yet. "But we have a game changing solution here and we don't think there's an equal competitor out there," he continued confidently. "So we're going to rewrite some of the rules and we think it's irrelevant what our competition is doing."

As for the market for new equipment, Schilling suggested commercial printers are faced with the choice of going digital or eventually going away. "You can look around and can see the companies that aren't surviving are the ones that haven't made the leap," he added. "You can tell that by just looking at the equipment auctions that are out there - the auctions don't have a lot of digital equipment. We've done our homework and we realize that if want to be equipment providers in this business going forward, it's going to be in color."

The Delphax deal is something of a coup for San Diego-based Memjet, though Jeff Bean, the company's director of branding and communication said, "We already have 10 or more OEMs we work with and that's across the office space and the industrial labels space and wide format."

The privately held Memjet was founded in 2002 and its core printheads, controller chips, software and ink are protected by 4,000 patents. Each Memjet printhead features more than 70,000 nozzles, each 1/10th the diameter of a human hair, that can fire more than 700m drops of ink on a page in a second.

Bean said Memjet technology is enabling its OEM equipment providers to come in at attractive price points for the market. "As you see different shops move away from flexo or offset and go digital, some printers have invested millions in new presses, but some of them don't have the capital to do that," he explained. "And now we're positioned to help those companies enter the space, because we're driving down the cost - we're driving down the costs for hardware and we're driving down the cost for total operations."