Heidelberg chairman Bernhard Schreier spoke of the "new face of the colour digital environment" at a year-end briefing last week.

"The competitive environment is changing," Schreier stated. "The pioneers Indigo and Xeikon as such will disappear. The colour digital environment will have a new face from now on: Heidelberg, Hewlett-Packard and Xerox will take the professional end. And who knows? A Japanese competitor may try to grow into this field too Ricoh and Canon are at the low end, but the gap is flexible."

Schreier said that he believed someone would rescue Xeikon, currently in the Belgian equivalent of Chapter 11, but "it will not be Heidelberg".

"The future of our industry and our company is digital. We are going that way but without forgetting what our traditional customers need," said Schreier, who added that he believed that in the future "intelligent" printers would combine both digital and offset "because they will want to offer a variety of print media and be a solutions provider for their customers."

He also commented on potential future digital print technologies for Heidelberg itself, specifically ink-jet: "We are very good at producing and developing highly sophisticated paper transport machines. Whatever the technology we arent worried about the future, because if this technology is good for high-speed we are ready to adapt the ink on paper."

Heidelberg showed a Quickmaster fitted with an ink-jet device printing at 1.6m per second in its future technology area at Drupa 2000. It also has a 40in-wide ink-jet array in its development lab. The array is made up of a number of smaller heads set up in a cascading format.

Story by Jo Francis