Last year was a good one for digital colour print, which doesn’t really come as much of a surprise. Interestingly, the buying trends for hardware had already anticipated the upswing in the British print industry, which is now slowly taking hold.

Placements for digital colour devices rose by over 14% in 2006 compared to 2005 – a total of 8,100 units were sold. That is a noticeably faster rate than the 10% growth for Western Europe as a whole. It is quite a refreshing change to 2005, when the market practically remained at a standstill compared to the year before.

The installation numbers for professional service providers still pale in comparison to the colour capacity sold into office markets. About 200,000 colour copiers were sold into offices last year in all of Europe. What does this have to do with printing services? A lot – potentially all of them are competition to all professional print service providers.

Fall of monochrome
The growth in digital colour print took some casualties, namely in digital high-speed black and white printing. About 40 years after the introduction of the colour television, digital print is finally turning towards colour as well. Last year, black and white printer sales reached the lowest volumes in years and the outlook is not too bright either. As the average speed of all installations increases, fewer devices are needed for monochrome printing, volumes of which are essentially remaining stable.

An interesting aspect of last year’s market was that the attention of buyers shifted to light production colour devices, which combine good production speeds with an excellent price. Copier-type devices account for the majority of placements, while dedicated high-speed colour printers contribute less than 10% of all colour devices sold. Sales of the heavy-duty printers also barely increased in 2006.

With a light production copier-type device, you can’t get all the bells and whistles that you might want, but with a decent front-end you can get a solid printer for mainstream colour work. Speed is less of an issue, as a price tag of under £40,000 will buy you a speed of 50 pages per minute. A short time ago, that would have easily set you back a six-figure sum for a comparable output speed. A light production copier/printer might even be the best solution when budgets are tight and a service provider wants to expand their business into the digital print arena. Still, for higher volumes more robust solutions with extended paper handling and lower running costs are needed.

High-end production
Obviously, buyers can only buy what is offered on the market at any given time and new high-end production printer launches have been rare over the past 18 months. However, I believe that the high-end production colour printer market will heat up considerably throughout 2007, especially with long-awaited products such as the Canon ImagePress C7000VP finally hitting the market.

We should also expect there to be some new and interesting offerings from other vendors, such as Kodak and Xerox. It may seem that the product rush in the run up to Drupa 2008 is starting a little prematurely, but a four-year cycle of product introductions is far too slow for a fast-moving market like digital print.

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