"There is pressure on the viability of silver halide as a process," said HP Indigo EMEA photo segment manager Raffael Kraus. "Silver halide paper prices have risen by 40% in the past two years and there is a question mark over the viability of some consumables manufacture."
The new press, the WS6600p; is a reel-fed Indigo based on the WS6000p, its development was spurred by customers who wanted to shift the production of 10x15cm photo prints away from silver halide. It features improved print quality, more stable colour, increased uptime and an easier to use interface.
The seven-colour machine uses CMYK plus light cyan, light magenta and light black (aka grey) inks. For 90% of work it will run in six-colour CMYK lc, lm mode at 20m/min. For black and white prints a new mode switches to a two-colour black and light black mode producing 60m/min.
One of HP’s partners is Imaging Solutions, the last producer of high-volume silver halide lab equipment, which ihas developed two photofinishing systems for HP Indigo presses.
"Imaging Solutions is the standard in silver halide," said Kraus. "It recently decided to develop solutions for the Indigo."
The two products are offline finishers, the FastCut for turning printed reels into sorted stacks of cut prints in a range of sizes from 10x15cm upwards, and the Digital Fastbook, which turns reels into ready to case-in lay-flat book blocks.
"One-pass production of lay flat books is a new development, previously it took a lot of manual steps, which makes them costly," said Kraus.
To enable the efficient production of photo prints on the WS6600p, Ultimate has developed PASS, a photo imposition package, which is designed to work with the JPEG format used and to integrate with the Imaging Solutions FastCut.
Lastly HP Indigo has partnered with Athentech Imaging to offer its Perfectly Clear image enhancement software.
