[INTRODUCTION]
[0:00:02] DB: This is the true story of two printers who agreed to podcast with me and have their opinions recorded. Listen to what happens when printers stop being polite and start getting real.
[0:00:13] JM: Hi, this is Jamie McLennan.
[0:00:15] WC: And this is William Crabtree.
[0:00:16] DB: And I’m your host, Deborah Corn. Welcome to the PrinterChat Podcast.
[EPISODE]
[0:00:26] DB: Hey, everybody. Welcome to Podcasts From the Printerverse. This is Deborah Corn, your Intergalactic Ambassador. This is PrinterChat. We have a special guest today, so we’re going to get to the catch-up right now, Jamie. What’s going on over there at Invoke Print and Marketing?
[0:00:43] JM: Morning, Deborah. How you doing? Invoke printing marketing, we just hired a new sales rep yesterday, who is a print and mail expert, which is amazing. He came from background of that. Our offset and digital people in New Jersey are super excited that they have somebody that’s going to be selling work that’s going to fit on their presses and keep them busy. He has spent a day with him yesterday, introducing him to the New Jersey plant. He’s over there a couple of days this week and then back in PA to learn what we do here. That’s always exciting when that happens. And it’s the last week for our intern. She’s been here 10 weeks already. She’s learned a ton. It’s been really cool having Laney here. She’s putting together a welcome kit that she’s designed and put together. It’s a really cool box that has a drawer that pulls out and it’ll have all kinds of cool stuff in it that shows off what we do. When we get new customers, we’ll give them a welcome kit to say, “Hey, by the way, we also do this.” Yeah. That’s what we’re working on right now and we’re having fun.
[0:01:39] DB: That’s amazing. William, how are things at the Tampa Media Organization?
[0:01:46] WC: Things are good. We launched stickergorrilla.com, and marketing that. Had marketing turned off. I haven’t done any paid advertising for Tampa Printer since February, I think.
[0:01:58] DB: What?
[0:01:59] WC: Yeah, I had it all turned off. We’ve been running straight organic.
[0:02:04] DB: Jamie, he’s selling prints like a human.
[0:02:08] WC: Well, I still had all the organic and we still rank in the maps and in the organic results for pretty much everything. But things have been slowing down.
[0:02:15] DB: Wait. I have to know, why did you turn it off just, because, money?
[0:02:18] WC: It needed a reset. I’d had everything on autopilot for too long and I turned it off and we went two months and I didn’t really see an impact on new accounts. I was like, “Eh. We’ll just leave it off.” I’ve left it off. Now we’re starting to see a decline in sales and new accounts. I’m redoing all of our Google ads right now for Tampa Printer, and then also doing marketing for the software. I’m bouncing between the three throughout my day, you know how I am, I’m ADD, so it’s like, I start working on one thing, and I’m like, “Oh,” and then I jump to another thing. Just all over the place. But that’s basically what my time is dedicated to right now.
[0:02:50] DB: Let’s just get a quick catch up on the software.
[0:02:52] WC: Printinginabox.com is live with our new billing system. It’s fully automated. Someone can sign up online. It launches their store automatically. It requires no human intervention. We have that live now. Now we’re driving traffic to the website. Dedicating my time on Printing in a Box, selling one – no, we actually have two types of licenses available on that one. Then once I get that machine moving, then I’ll refocus attention on auto print.
[0:03:18] DB: Cool, man. My catch up, Girls Who Print is plugging along. We have tons of new members coming through our organization partners. Everybody should check out the website. If you see your company listed as a sponsor, you can join Girls Who Print at no cost. That includes the gentleman. We are always also looking for sponsors and some support to continue our mission. If you are feeling generous, please stop by. You can download a sponsorship proposal, or just make a donation. They are tax deductible in the United States. But I am not providing tax advice. Consult your preparer.
The other thing, I am going to be the emcee of The Pulse at Label Expo for the run of the show. Then after that, I am doing what the Europeans do, I’m hopping over to another country and I will be attending the print show in Birmingham, England. This is all in September. Yeah, lots going on. I’m sure I’ll have a lot to say about Label Expo. I can’t wait to go to that show. Yeah. That’s what’s up. The thing I spoke about last time that was launching soon is still not launched, so I’m glad I didn’t say anything about it. But I promised, the next podcast we will be able to talk about it.
I mentioned that we have a guest, somebody who should be familiar to everybody listening to this podcast channel. Pat McGrew is a marketing and print communication consultant, analyst, speaker, an award-winning educator with over three decades in the print and customer communication field. She’s also the author of many books. As the Managing Director of McGrewGroup, she advises on workflow optimization, business triage, and best practices for print, CCM, Customer Communication Management, I’m assuming, packaging labels and production technology. Pat is also the co-host of The Print Report, all the print that’s fit for news right here on the Podcast From the Printerverse channel. Pat, welcome to the program and fill in any gaps that I left out in your bio, because you do so much.
[0:05:31] PM: Gaps. I’m just a jack of all trades. I’m like, in a lot of way, Jamie and Will, because I think we each have a different set of skills, as Liam Neeson might say, and we can apply them in strange and unusual ways. I tell people, I don’t do the same thing for any two clients, because I get the call of last resort, right? “We tried everything else. Now, we don’t know what to do. Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi. You’re our only hope.” We get those calls.
[0:06:05] DB: I used to say, it was call 1-800-PAT. Now I call you PatGPT. I don’t know if you know that.
[0:06:10] PM: I did not know that, but sometimes that’s true, too. We also help people who get in trouble by listening to ChatGPT and go down a road that turns out to be really wrong. I’m constantly building new skills. While I’m happy to talk to you about system 360, MVS systems, or VM systems from the 70s, 80s, and 90s, I’m also happy to talk to you about PDF, AI-driven workflows, agentic workflows, hybrid workflows, the hybrid color management market research into new product areas, help triage your products. You mentioned the word triage. What we mean by that is you’ve been selling the same thing for 20 years. Gee, it’s not making you as much money as it used to. Let’s talk about that.
We have ideas and ways, by looking at what you already have in your shop as data and then looking at some additional market research we have access to, we might be able to help you make just a couple of tweaks and breathe new life into the product catalog you already have. We were talking a little before the show started about, oh my God, setting up web stores can seem to be a nightmare. I’m not going to set up your web store, but I can help you build that product catalog from what you’re already doing.
I’ll just stop there. What do you do, Deb? You drop me a tweet, or you drop me a WhatsApp and you go, “Somebody just asked us this, and print professionals group, or Girls Who Print group or as I was saying, I don’t even know what they’re asking.” Usually, I know what they’re asking and we can point them in a direction. It’s very rare that we don’t have an answer for somebody.
[0:07:53] DB: Correct. I mean, when I go to PatGPT, it is something I’m just like, what is going on here? I have no idea. The reason we have brought you in, we put up the Pat signal and we called you in, because in one of our podcasts, the gentleman got very curious about inkjet printing and mistakenly started asking me questions –
[0:08:15] PM: I do that, too.
[0:08:17] DB: Started asking me questions about it. I was like, well, the first time I ever saw it, or heard about it was with Pat McGrew. Perhaps, we could get her on the program. I know that they’ve done research. Jamie has a bunch of questions prepared. Jamie, I’m going to kick it over to you to start our conversation.
[0:08:35] JM: Thanks, Deborah. Yes. I mean, I’ve known about inkjet for years. We’ve looked at it. But looking at what we do, we’re offset direct mail, cut sheet, digital and our New Jersey plant, which I see this fitting in it eventually. We have customers that do letter runs, variable data from 8,000 to 40,000. I’m like, I mean, every time I look at inkjet, I feel like we’re not in their wheelhouse. We’re too small. I just am like, where’s that magic number have to be for us to even start considering a press like that? I know you said you can look at what we do now and make tweaks and stuff like that, but inkjet might be one of those tweaks, because I know we have a customer who keeps growing and doing more variable data and more letters, but where is that sweet spot?
[0:09:19] PM: Jamie, the answer is variable. I know this is going to surprise you. What it comes down to is looking at which pieces of your business are really likely sweet spots for inkjet printing. One place to start is to look at the things that you do that are letter size, right? If you’re doing a decent amount of letter size work that is variable work that doesn’t need what we’d call litho quality printing, or even your wide format UV 22-color printing. I’ve seen you guys do amazing stuff. CYMK would work. There are just a whole lot of machines in the market right now that do reasonable color for those kinds of applications. Because they’re inkjet and because they’re digital, you create the file, you create a template for that work, you create a database of the data that’s going to feed it and you create variable data printing. These workflows are not difficult to put together. They’re pretty much standard these days. You can buy a machine that will do letter size printing for, let’s call it, ballpark, under $300,000 will get you there.
Now, is that going to comport with the quality that people are expecting from your specific company? Well, it might, because that’s down to you, your eye and your customers and the kind of work they’re producing. If it’s letters and solicitations and things like that, that can be a good solution. Of course, you might want to step it up a little bit. You might actually want to look at either one of the web presses, or one of the sheet fed presses that can handle heavier stocks, so you can also do variable postcards, right?
Biggest thing in direct mail marketing is postcards of all sizes. You might want to step it up a little bit. Then, what do I have to spend? Well, what I have to spend then is probably in the neighborhood anywhere from 750,000 to a million and a half. Why is it such a big range? Because the capabilities are different, because the speeds are different, because the ease of use is different, and the footprint might be different as well. You can get a very nice inkjet, web press that can do updating point stop. It can do your basic postcards. It can come with different drying capabilities, so that you can buy what you need, pay for what it is you actually need to be drying, because in inkjet printing, drying is the bigger trick than printing these days, right? You can spend that.
Then, if you want to think mega, you can spend 5 million on an inkjet press. You can spend 8 million on an inkjet press, that will do everything, up to and including brushing your teeth. It’s horses for courses, as my UK friends always say. It’s knowing which pieces of your business. The first thing that I would do is I would look very carefully, I would do one of those deep-seek research things where I’d look at what jobs do I have that are variable data seriously. When I say variable data, I mean two things. I mean, inserting text into a template. That’s static. I also mean, the variable content production where it actually might be building on the fly based on an asset library.
I’ve got a trigger list that says, if I’ve got somebody who’s living in Bucks County, I use these images. If I’ve got somebody who’s living in upper Bucks, I do a different vision, different one than lower Bucks. I do a different one if I’m over on the western side of Pennsylvania. I do a different one if I’m in upstate New York. I do different ones for Baltimore. I do it right based on zip code and ZIP+4, I vary the images that I put into my marketing messages. I might even vary the marketing messages.
One of my favorite ones for that is people who sell tires, big chains and small chains that sell tires. They know that people need to buy, if you live in the north, you buy snow tires. If you live in the Midwest, lower Midwest, you might be buying all weather tires and not snow tires. If you’re in Montana, North Dakota, you’re in Wisconsin, Michigan, Northern Illinois, you’re buying the ones that have the studs on them. Based on zip code, ZIP+4, especially, they know whether you’re urban, or rural or suburban. They know based on that, which images to pull from the database. They craft the text asset so that it speaks to the things you’re experiencing.
Things are so smart these days, Jamie, it’s almost scary. We used to have to pre-build those text assets. You can still do that. That’s still an easy thing to do. Then you wrote them all together with a program that pulls the right image and the right text block and sticks it on the postcard, or in the letter.
[0:14:32] JM: Yeah, we do a lot of that. Yup. Okay.
[0:14:33] PM: Today, we could actually do that a whole lot easier. We could use a low code, no code workflow that will actually write the text for you based on the zip code and the product that you’re trying to sell and do that on the fly.
[0:14:50] DB: But that doesn’t have anything to do with inkjet printing. That’s just digital printing in general, right?
[0:14:56] PM: 80% of inkjet printing is building the file.
[0:14:59] DB: Oh, okay.
[0:15:00] PM: Right? In Jamie’s, what we’re talking about is variable data, which is where inkjet shines. Have we done variable data printing for years? We have. I started doing it in the 80s. At the end of the day, we did it on toner equipment for a long time. Heck, we did it with dot matrix printers, which are actually inkjet printers, in many cases, for a long time. The difference is that today, inkjet is your cheapest path to cost-effective, high-speed, full color variable content printing.
[SPONSOR MESSAGE]
[0:15:34] PM: McGrewGroup can help you with assessments, RFP reviews, education content, and surveys. Plus, our consulting practice to offer guidance on your best business workflows and integrations. McGrewGroup is ready to help you grow, expand, optimize, and thrive. Drop us a note on LinkedIn, or at our website, mcgrewgroup.com.
[EPISODE CONTINUED]
[0:16:00] DB: You’re saying, looking at it as, do I have enough volume might –
[0:16:06] PM: You always have enough volume. It’s a question for each thing.
[0:16:08] DB: It’s about looking at everything and seeing how much variable data you are doing. Then if there’s a significant amount, then it’s worth – are you talking about replacing the toner devices with inkjet for everything?
[0:16:24] PM: One, yes. But okay, it’s two things. One, you always have enough volume for inkjet. It’s a question of whether the quality that is available on the volume appropriate inkjet is going to work for your applications, right? Jamie, you wouldn’t do that New Orleans’ jazz poster on Kyocera, TASKalfa Pro, right? I mean, you just wouldn’t. But you might do a whole heck of a lot of your postcard work on that kind of device, or a RISO ComColor device, because they do really great color. They’re really easy to operate. They have a lot of substrate range and they’re nice cut sheet devices that you can practice with inkjet, and a lot of people do that.
Then they grow into some bigger platform, either they do one of two things, they either just start buying more of them and create a network workflow for their inkjet production, or they graduate into a bigger, faster inkjet device from one of the other vendors that are out there.
[0:17:22] JM: I like what you said about the letters, find how many letters we have. But then, because before, that’s all I thought of inkjet as was running letters, or booklets that are all text weight, but I saw some that offered up to nine-point and then you set up to 18-point. Because we do a lot of clinical mail.
[0:17:35] PM: In some cases. Yeah.
[0:17:36] JM: Because that would be huge for the political mail work, as long as we put on a heavier card stock, so we’re talking in the middle of range inkjet, rather than a low-end, because we need that cover stock capability.
[0:17:47] PM: That’s where you want to talk to the available inkjet vendor family, right? You want to have a conversation with your friends at HP, your friends at RICO, your friends at Canon, your friends at RISO, your friends at Kyocera, who are now partnering with Xerox as well, because they all have a range of inkjet production solutions that can fit most volume bands in a reasonable way with a reasonable ROI. There are differences in color quality that’s available. That’s where you have to look at what your customers expect, what you’ve been promising them. You also might be having a conversation with your customers and say, “Look, I can do this. For you, I’ll do it at this price,” which still gives you 50% margin, but “If you would like this, which is much higher quality, I’ll do it for you for this,” and maybe you’ll get 20% margin, right? Those are the games that you have to play from the business side to figure out which thing you want to be known for in the inkjet space with your customers.
Especially if you’re talking customers who are currently, say, wide format customers of yours, who are also maybe mail marketing, or brochure customers of yours. They may find that, especially for what we call this, I hate this term, but what we call throw away print, right? It’s the political mailers. It’s the letters that go out, the solicitation letters that go out. For those kinds of things, the kind of color that comes off of, say, a RISO ComColor, or Kyocera TASKalfa is actually very reasonable.
In most cases, what I always remind people is, what would your mother say? For years, my mom was my test. If I showed her something and she went, “Yeah, that’s fine.” I’m thinking, “My God. How can she say that about that?” My God, look at that, that moiré pattern there and look at that there and look at this, right? All the things we look at, nobody else looks at. A lot of your customers have gotten smarter about how much they want to pay for what they want to produce. You may be able to come to them and say, “Hey, I can do this job for you at this level for this cost,” which might even be less than what they’re currently paying you and you still get 50% margin, or at least 30% margin on it, then that’s good business, right?
Inkjet is always going to be the cheapest way to print, because compared to toner, which is a silica-based color model, the toner is only going to get more and more and more and more expensive. Even liquid toner is getting more and more expensive. That’s not going to change. While inkjet ink, it’s not cheap, we always used to say, and we still do that think about your desktop inkjet printer, an ounce of that ink is worth more than an ounce of gold. At the same time, it’s very thin usage, right? I mean, you’re putting down microns of ink. The cost of the ink, while everybody hates the cost of the ink, the truth is that in terms of what it produces for you and what you can mark it up, there is no cheaper way to print.
[0:21:08] DB: Will?
[0:21:09] WC: I have been a big naysayer of the whole inkjet movement, since it’s been going on, right?
[0:21:14] PM: Fair comment.
[0:21:14] WC: I’m a toner guy, offset guy, right? Now, I have a bit of change in my tune, but I still push back against the concept that it should replace toner. I recently had someone try to pitch me on a Kyocera to replace my RICOs, or to replace one of my RICOs.
[0:21:31] PM: Yeah. You might not want to do that.
[0:21:33] WC: Well, and for me, I’m a full flood 1319, everything that I run is full, and I know exactly what my click cost is. My machine goes down, I make a call. Someone shows up, they replace the parts. It’s all included, right? Where the inkjet model is consumables. You have to pay for your ink. You have to pay for your parts if it goes down. You have to call your service person. They don’t have service contracts on them.
[0:21:54] PM: Yeah, they do.
[0:21:54] WC: Not the same way that they do for toner contracts. Not similar to toners.
[0:21:56] PM: I think it depends on who you’re talking to, but, I mean, yeah.
[0:21:59] WC: Okay, fair. My push back is the conversation is that this should be the new thing, that this should replace the toner model, which I disagree with. However, I took a tour of the RICO facility about a month ago. I saw the big web fad –
[0:22:13] PM: Wait a minute. You came into town and you didn’t tell me?
[0:22:17] WC: I told you that I was coming up there. You’re the one that told me that, “Tell my wife to make sure she wore tennis shoes, because if she wore shoes, she’d be in trouble.”
[0:22:22] PM: That’s true, too. That’s true. That is very true. That’s true. I’m sorry, I forget. I wasn’t here. I wasn’t here.
[0:22:28] WC: Yeah. You were out of town when I was up there.
[0:22:29] PM: Yeah. Yeah, sorry about that.
[0:22:31] WC: I took a tour of the facility and I saw what was coming off the web fad. I think they’re around the million-dollar range, the big boys that they’ve got at the RICO. One, one and a half.
[0:22:38] PM: The VC80 they have up in the CEC is, yeah, that cost you a little over a million.
[0:22:44] WC: Yeah. From the conversation for that replacing an offset press, I think is a homerun, right? Your full color, your print quality is there. You can run 18-point card stock. You can do the versatility. You don’t have your ready make. You don’t have your plates. You have all of these things that it counteracts that. Then in addition, you throw in the cost savings for it. I think it’s a win across the board, when the conversation is inkjet replacing the offset. I’m an odd duck, too. My print shop is I have to have versatility in what I can do with my machine and the inkjet is the conversation from the – that’s usually just a little touch of color. If you need just a little touch of color, inkjet is, great. But if you’re doing full flood, full color, the type of stuff that I’m typically doing, it’s not a winning proposition. I don’t think anyway.
[0:23:30] PM: I would push back on a couple of things there. One, I agree with you that there is always going to be a place for toner in the world, because there are things you can do with toner. There is a crispness to the text. There is a crispness to give color that is different and it will go on any kind of substrate. You can put textured stock through most, through a Pro C, a RICO Pro C and get brilliant color. You can do the same things for when you’re a desk, you get just brilliant, brilliant color. There are an awful lot of applications for toner-based printing that just won’t go away.
When you’re talking about what I think of as relatively short-run, high-quality color work, toner shines, because you’re already probably charging a premium to some extent for that work, and it justifies what you’re paying for maintaining that toner-based product, right? I don’t disagree with you. What I will say is that it depends on who you talk to on the inkjet side about service ability and service, whether you’re going to have to wait for somebody that every kind of service model is available from different inkjet vendors. It depends on whether you’re buying from a dealer, or you’re buying directly from the vendor. There’s all sorts of variations.
If you talk to RISO directly and you talk to some of their dealers, you talk to Kyocera directly, you talk to some of their dealers, in terms of cut sheet inkjet, right at that level, either letter or 13 by 19 solutions that are out there, I think there’s some out there, but they might not meet your color standards for the kind of work you’re doing, or your substrate needs. The thing where inkjet still has some challenges is it won’t print on everything that a toner box will print on. It won’t print on everything that a typical offset shop can print on. Heck, even wide format can print on, right? You can print on vinyl, but you’re not going to put vinyl through your TASKalfa Pro.
[0:25:26] WC: Right. Inkjet is just now getting to the point where it can do these sticker stocks. It can do coded stocks. I mean, it’s –
[0:25:32] PM: It’s a paper transport issue. Yeah. And a drying issue. Forgive me for bringing up the Landa word, but one of the things that Landa approved is that you could print offset blanket style print using inkjet technology. It’s Fuji SAMBA heads, Fujifilm SAMBA heads and blanket technology, very similar to the Indigo blanket technology for toner, for liquid toner. It places an image on a sheet that because it’s transfer technology, has a much wider substrate range for you than you would get anywhere else. Our friend, Paul Hudson at Hudson Printing prints images from the James Webb telescope on his Landa that, I mean, you put a loop on these things and the original images were 6,000 DPI, and the crispness that he gets off that thing just blow people away. Is that for everybody? No, it is not.
You have to separate the technology, the inkjet technology from the paper transport and the drying technology and then put that in a box and then put your need at the top of the pyramid. It’s an upside-down pyramid. What do I really need out of my print and marking technology? Who am I selling into? What are their needs? Then you start to zero in, well, for this class of customers, offset makes much more sense. For this class of customers, color toner boxes make more sense. Maybe I want that Pro C from RICO, because that thing produces amazing print. Maybe I want an Iridesse, or something like that that is going to give me that kind of quality, or an MGI that’s going to give me that kind of quality. Maybe I want inkjet for different classes.
Not every shop can have every technology on their floor, right? We get that. Sometimes the trick is to figure out what you think most of your customers will go for, invest in that technology with a five-year outlook and then find partners for the stuff that you’d like to be able to sell, but don’t want to put the equipment on your floor.
[0:27:46] WC: Makes sense. No, I’m all about finding partners and outsourcing and brokering.
[0:27:50] PM: Practicing with inkjet with a partner is not a bad idea, right?
[0:27:53] WC: No. Not at all.
[0:27:54] DB: Yeah. I was actually going to ask that. Do they have trade printers who print inkjet?
[0:27:58] PM: Every trade printer prints inkjet. Every one of them that I work with and others that I have worked with. Everybody’s got inkjet in their production catalog. As a rule, trade printers know when to say yes to it as a job and when to say no, and then go in and get it. That one doesn’t go in the inkjet. We have, or we just don’t recommend inkjet for it at all, or we recommend a different version of inkjet, because remember, all these wide format devices that are out there, if you look at the Rolands and the Mimakis and all these stand printers, they’re all inkjet printers, right? We just don’t think of them that way. I mean, Jamie, you got lots of experience with inkjet. It’s just different inkjet, right?
[0:28:44] JM: Yeah, we do. Yeah. Large format inkjet.
[0:28:48] PM: Yeah. We’ve watched people do, they get funny. Printers are an amazing group of people and we always say that whatever product you sell to a printer, they will never use it the way you sold it to them, or for the purpose you sold it to them for, right? Will, you know that trying to sell stuff for the people, right? I mean, they’re going to do things you just never – We know of printers who have amazing business card businesses using stand roll-fed printers. Yeah, I can buy a six-color roll-fed stand printer, wide format printer. I can put card stock through it. I can do six color business cards when my guy down the street who invested in a CYMK toner printer, or inkjet printer can only do four-color, right? I can do it on substrates that are different. I can do vinyl business cards for somebody if I want to, and they do.
[0:29:43] DB: Okay. That’s cool.
[0:29:44] PM: They do, right? Or I can do the little film cards. There’s all sorts of things that you can do with those printers, with those inkjet printers, that you don’t do with traditional production inkjet printer.
[0:29:56] DB: Then you need the cutty things, as we like to say on this podcast.
[SPONSOR MESSAGE]
[0:30:01] DB: Girls Who Print provides women in print and graphic communications with information resources, events, and mentorship to help them navigate their careers and the industry. As the largest independent network of women in print and a nonprofit organization, our global mission to provide resources, skill-building, education, and support for women to lead, inspire, and empower has never been stronger or more accessible. Through our member platform and program, as well as regional groups forming around the world, your access to Girls Who Print is just a click away. Gentlemen, you are most welcome to join us as allies. Get involved and get empowered today. Link in the show notes.
[EPISODE CONTINUED]
[0:30:47] DB: Jamie, question?
[0:30:49] JM: No. Somewhat going back to, Will talked about dependability and downtime, you leaned on that a little bit, is inkjet, it’s just as good as all the other pieces of equipment out there. Will’s like, “I have an agreement, they’re going to come out and fix it.” Do I need two inkjet presses? Remember, back in the days when Indigo first came out, you needed to buy two of them and hire guys right there and fix it for you? Are we advanced now and we’re fine. We’re buying one and it’s going to hold up and it’s going to take the punishment that us printers are going to do with it.
[0:31:20] DB: Pat, if you could just tag on to that answer about supply chain.
[0:31:25] PM: Yeah. Will, did you have a thought there, too?
[0:31:28] WC: No. I mean, just piggybacking on that, the reliability of, I mean, a toner-based machine, I have a service tech in my shop, no less than once a month, no less. Usually, every other week, so forth. That’s the benefit of the toner base and the click contract is that I call and they show up the same day, next day, and back up and running. That’s also why I have – I always have more than one, though, too.
[0:31:46] PM: You’re also in a metropolitan area, where that’s possible. Yeah. Here’s what I would say to Jamie, to answer your question at the baseline, the really cool thing is we’re in 2025 and not 2005, or 2015, right? Or even 2000. In the last four or five years, inkjet technology has made just leaps in terms of reliability, serviceability, maintenance cycles, head life, right? When I was first bringing inkjet to market in the early 2000s, head life was a little suspicious. We would tell you that you were going to get a number of hours out of it, but we didn’t really know. We were guessing a lot.
Different styles of inkjet. Printheads have different histories of life spans. If you’re buying things from RICO and Canon, you’re buying what’s effectively electronic pulse inkjet. It’s pulses that drive the bubbles of ink down onto the page. They’re actually really reliable printheads and have really, really, really long head life. If you’re buying from HP, you’re buying what’s called thermal inkjet, which means that it’s a heat induced bubble. Again, really, really long head life. I mean, today, three, four X of what it was five years ago, right? The heads last a really long time.
If you’re a Kodak inkjet customer and there are still a fair number of them out there, that’s continuous inkjet. It rains little ink droplets down there. There’s no moving parts in that printhead. It’s basically ensuring that as long as you’re using high-quality ink, it doesn’t damage the nozzles, life is great. If you’re using any of the devices that use Fujifilm SAMBA printheads, really excellent, excellent, excellent printhead life.
The thing that used to kill inkjet reliability was that nozzles would go out and you’d wind up with these streaks of white through your stuff, because the nozzle head died. All of the manufacturers today have technology in their DFE to printhead connectivity that solves for nozzle degradation, right? Nozzles can degrade, and also, for nozzle outages, where it will, in the software, it’s constantly evaluating head health and constantly making adjustments so that the print quality you get on sheet one should be the same print quality you get on sheet one million, right? That is what they’re designed to do.
The other thing that has happened over just the last couple of years is that all of the manufacturers have begun embedding more AI than was in there originally. Look, we’ve been using machine learning, artificial intelligence in our digital front ends for the digital print industry for decades. This is not new to us in print technology. We just didn’t really talk about it, because we didn’t see any reason to. When GPT exploded and the talk track started to change, all the questions started coming, well, why aren’t you asking ChatGPT to tune my press for me, so that I have better uptime? Well, it turns out they were already working on it. You buy a VC80000 from RICO and it’s got GPT technology embedded in it, so that it’s constantly monitoring not just the current state of the press, from all the sensors and all the data that no human could ever fully analyze in real time. It’s also doing look back at the history of the machine and the history of maintenance cycles, when the last maintenance was done, when the last part, when a cog was changed, when a gear was changed, when a roller was changed, and it’s now doing what they call predictive maintenance alerts.
It works in two directions. It will tell you to skip a maintenance cycle. If you really don’t need it, why spend a bunch of downtime and money on new parts if you don’t really need those parts, right? It’ll do that for you. Then, it will also do the other. If maybe you’ve had some unusual wear because you’ve been running some unusually heavy substrate through, and so it’s been wearing the rollers a little bit more, it’s been dragging a little bit more, it’s caused some of the sensors to detect anomalies, it’ll tell you that too, so that maybe you run, you schedule your maintenance cycle ahead.
What it does is allow you to do smarter scheduling of your preventive maintenance cycles and gives you more early warning on things that might be outside the normal preventative guidelines, so that you don’t wind up in Will’s situation where he’s just thanking God that he’s got a service check who lives not far and can get to him pretty quick, right? In most cases, the maintenance cycles on these inkjet presses have gotten longer and longer and longer and longer apart, because now smart technology is doing things with the data we couldn’t do a few years ago. It’s actually reading all the sensor data.
It’s not just RICO. HP is doing this with their presses. Canon is doing this with their presses, these new presses that you’ll see coming from that Canon-Heidelberg partnership, the new packaging press coming in will have it built in there. When you start looking at all of these inkjet digital front-ends and how they talk and capture information off of the machines, the biggest barrier to smart maintenance cycles was that we couldn’t analyze the data available out of the machine fast enough to do anything about it, right?
I would say one, Will, one of the things we’ll see is that we will see that the maintenance cycles in inkjet land will actually start to outpace a typical toner base cycle and uptime availability over the next few years, because these DFTs are getting smarter and smarter. If you think about inkjet machines turnover, typically, five to eight years, right? Within the next five to eight years, everything that will be in production in the marketplace will be at this upgraded level of smart interaction. Once you build the system that allows that data to be analyzed, making it smarter and smarter and smarter isn’t hard. It’s just getting the machines in the field that have that technology embedded in them.
Deb, to your supply chain question, the thing that this does is allow us to be smarter about when we order consumables, and when we order for those machines that have to be purged and use a solvent for those purges. It gives you a chance to do smarter ordering of those things. You don’t have to order way ahead on the fear that you’re going to run out of something. It’s going to help you make smarter decisions about that, based on a constant understanding of what your workload is and an ability to reach into your order book of what’s coming up. It can help you make smarter decisions about not only when to schedule your maintenance, but also, when to place the orders. It can also be keeping an eye on supply prices.
If you start thinking about some of the things we were talking about in terms of maybe adding a little bit of agentic AI into your workflow, having it watch the information coming from the press, from the DFE and the operator alerts, having it watch your procurement information about current pricing and your usage patterns, having it look at your inventory, but also look at your order book. What’s coming in? Not just your regular work, but when some weird big job comes in, it can throw an alert. It could actually even automatically order for you to make sure that you have everything that you need. All of those things can be done today with low-code, no-code solutions that are relatively inexpensive to build, and that’s what keeps these really expensive presses up and running and getting an ROI that gets smaller and smaller, even when you’re paying a million dollars for a press.
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[EPISODE CONTINUED]
[0:40:54] DB: Okay, everybody. We want to wrap this up. Jamie, do you have any more burning questions?
[0:40:59] JM: No. No burning questions. No.
[0:41:01] DB: Will, do you have any burning questions?
[0:41:03] WC: I don’t.
[0:41:04] DB: Okay. I want to ask one question and then we’ll wrap it up, okay? Pat, it’s been almost 10 years since I went to drupa with you and acted as the press check.
[0:41:15] PM: You’re my eyes. Yeah.
[0:41:17] DB: Perspective. We are still having conversations about color when it comes to inkjet. Can you explain why that is?
[0:41:30] PM: Sure. Every printhead technology works a little bit differently. The way an inkjet head knows what color droplets to drop where on a piece of paper is an amazingly robust piece of engineering and science and magic. It takes a while for it to turn into the kind of engineering science and magic that is reliable. That’s the printhead. The other thing that is a major element is the ink itself. In the early days of inkjet, we were effectively printing with watercolor. We used to politely call it business color. If I showed you things that we printed in 2008, you would look at it and you would go, “My gosh, has that been sitting out in the sun?” No, that’s actually how it came off the press.
[0:42:28] DB: Can Jamie and I just have a moment on business color? Jamie, come on. I mean, we’ve heard it all, but –
[0:42:33] PM: Oh, my God.
[0:42:33] DB: Business color? I’m going to add that to –
[0:42:36] JM: Selling business color.
[0:42:38] PM: We called it business color. That was the Kodak CIJ line for five, six years. It was because inkjet ink is in the production space, not in the wide format space, Jamie, where a lot of times it’s solvent-based UV curable inks, which have a lot more pigment in them and fade a lot less. In production inkjet, where we’re printing typically on paper-based substrates and card-based substrates, we’re printing with water that has a little bit of pigment in it. You may have heard the term, nanography, okay. It’s not a real thing. All that means is we micro-milled some pigment, and that was something that we were doing at Kodak back in the early 2000s. You micro-milled it, and that’s what gives you more reflectiveness of the color pigment, so there’s more edges for the color to reflect from, the smaller the piece of pigment is. You go down to microns, and that’s what nanography technically is.
It’s not magic. It’s just how you suspend the pigment in the water and what other chemical magic you play in it that determines how vibrant the color you can get out of the ink is, and then how much ink do you use. Funny thing about inkjet is you always want to dial your ink limits way, way back with inkjet. When you’re doing production inkjet, it’s counterintuitive. You don’t run 350% black. You run 180% black, or maybe 120% black. You don’t run 180% cyan. You run maybe 90% cyan, because the less ink you put down, the more vibrant your color is. It took us a while to learn that, right? In the early days of inkjet, we were loading the paper with ink and going, “Why does it look so crappy?” Over the last 10 years, we’ve learned a lot.
The other thing that’s happened is that it took a while to get the inkjet OEMs to understand that color matters. They were so enamored with the inkjet head technology that sometimes you’re trying to get an engineer to understand, people actually have to use this stuff, right? They actually have color requirements that they have to meet for their customers. It took a while to get them to understand that putting a photo spectrometer on the press and having it integrated with the digital front end and the head management solution to ensure that the color quality that was being called for by the inbound file and how it was being translated through the rip, into the raster images that were going to be printed, the color was a material part of that, and it took a while to get there. Today, everybody can do that.
Now, does that mean that every job that you print will be perfect and you don’t have to do anything and it’s just going to be magic? Well, the answer is no. The answer is that there are still variations in what a customer wants from the file that they deliver. Deb, why did I bring you to drupa? Why did I make you live in Germany for two and a half weeks? Because I was printing Star Wars posters on a packaging press. Nobody should ever do that. It’s just not a thing that’s done. Yet, we did it and we got the folks who own that copyright to say, “Oh, yeah. We’ll approve that.”
[0:45:57] DB: Within that, they accused us of pre-printing the posters.
[0:46:00] PM: They did.
[0:46:01] DB: Because they look too good for inkjet.
[0:46:02] PM: They look too good. What we were able to do is because you were standing there, telling me with your print buyer eye, “Ooh, that’s a little too cyan. That’s a little too orangey,” whatever it was. I could then translate into engineer speak for my guys who were standing at the console and they would tune the ink settings, no differently than you do playing with ink keys on an offset, right?
[0:46:26] DB: Well, it was different, though, because you could only subtract. In this one, you couldn’t add. That’s math came into play, then I stayed out of it.
[0:46:33] PM: No, you were out of that one. We knew what our limits were. We knew how to get, because we always know we want less ink, not more ink in order to get our colors. That was what we were able to do, standing there live on the floor. As you will recall, we had to do it every time we ran that job over that two weeks, because what our inkjet and paper really, really sensitive to? Moisture in the air. God bless it, it kept raining on us. Then, also, low humidity, right? Those things will change the absorption characteristics of the paper. Unlike toner, where we’re basically putting little pieces of silicon on a paper and fusing it to the top of the paper, it doesn’t sink in, and unlike offset where we have all sorts of known things that we do in order to understand what the dot game will be, and unlike wide format inkjet, where we’re typically printing on non-absorbent substrates.
With inkjet, especially in a production state, we’re producing things on paper that has absorbency levels. Moisture in the air, either too much or too little, impacts how the color is absorbed. That’s why color continues to be a conversation. It continues to be a piece of the technology that is being worked on in R&D labs, because solving for unknown environmental factors, it’s not a junior level problem.
[0:48:04] DB: Yeah. I know enough to know that if you’re investigating this, that it might be a great idea to send some test files to somebody, print out what your customers have print, maybe their last job or something, show it to them, make any adjustments that you need to adjust, perhaps create a brand standards for them that says, “This is your blue. This is what your blue looks like on inkjet. This is what your blue looks like on a web press. This is what your blue looks like on a screen press,” whatever it might be, have them sign off on it. Then you can use the best technology at the moment for that job. Would you agree with that, Patricia?
[0:48:45] PM: Yes, but there’s one step further. What the smartest inkjet printers I know do is they create three levels of color that they can deliver to a customer. They can do just straight printing on very absorbent paper and they’ll do it relatively cheaply for you. You get what you get. I can do it by using a little bit better paper that’s inkjet prepared, or inkjet optimized and not as absorbent as a result. I’m going to charge a little bit more, because the paper costs me a little bit more. I’ll do that, or I can do this for you and it’ll look really very nice. For most people, that’s going to do it.
Or, I can go one better and I can actually put a primer down on the paper and eliminate the absorption entirely. That costs a little bit more, because I have to pay for the primer in addition to paying for the ink, right? I got to charge a little bit more for that. They’ll show a customer the work and they’ll say, “Here’s your work on this paper, this paper, and this paper. Here’s what’s going to cost for each of these. What would you like?” The customer can make the decision. Because there will be differences in how the color resolves and what its vibrancy is.
Also, there are differences between manufacturers. If you’re running Canon and RICO in your shop, or you’re running Screen and HP in your shop, you actually will notice that they’re different, because their ink and their pigments are sourced from different places. Reds especially are, we used to laugh when I was a Kodak. We couldn’t print Kodak red. We could do Kodak orange. We could not do Kodak red, because the red that they used in their logo color used a different basis pigment than what most inkjet ink used.
The answer is yes, all of those things are doable. As a printer, smart business should be your goal. Smart business is knowing in advance what your costs are for different levels of possibilities. That means you might need to take a couple steps back and learn what the possibilities are if you own and operate one of these presses already, or if you’re on the road to buying one. Because every press manufacturer can get you where you want to go. It’s just how much you’re willing to invest in time and learning.
[0:51:02] DB: Yeah. That’s why we brought you on to the podcast, too, so people can start their journeys. Will, final words?
[0:51:10] WC: Like I said, I’ve been a naysayer for a long time. I’m coming to the other side of the fence and I’m excited about the technology. I think that it’s come a long way and I’m excited to see what comes next.
[0:51:21] DB: Excellent. Jamie?
[0:51:23] JM: Kind of the same thing. Because back in early printing and not even before that in print in Chicago, I was looking at them and going, “Yeah, it’s just not us. We just don’t have the volume.” I always thought it was a volume thing. I need thousands and thousands, 100,000 of pieces to run an inkjet. Now I’m like, all right, so I can do letters and I can do postcards. I can manage multiple customers now with a press that will carry different roles. Yeah, it’s something to look at, something to check in our volume of what we’re doing, and is that feasible down the line?
[0:51:53] DB: Yeah. You’re not crazy. In the beginning, it was all a conversation of inkjet versus offset. Everybody focused on that, which I can’t even tell you how that was the wrong conversation to have, because anybody you showed, this is offset, this is inkjet. They were like, “Why are you showing me this? Offset all day long, every day, get that, feed it out, blurry thing away from me.” Go ahead, Pat.
[0:52:16] PM: Some of that is print salespeople are the worst people to show you what’s possible with inkjet print technology, because as a rule, it’s not their fault. They haven’t been educated, right? The print vendors don’t take time to make sure that their print salespeople actually understand. Can’t take an Indigo sales guy and have him go out and sell a VC80, right? You can’t take an Iridesse sales guy, because an Iridesse will sing and dance and brush your teeth for you and have them go out and try to sell a Canon IX. Yet, that’s what happens in our industry. Our sales guys, they do really well and they look for a better comp deal. Next thing, they’re selling something that they don’t understand at all, so they sell just like they sold List and they sold.
[0:53:01] DB: Yeah. No, totally.
[0:53:02] PM: They’re telling the wrong stories, giving the wrong advice, and it’s really not great.
[0:53:07] DB: No, it’s not. Actually, that’s how Project Peacock started, because nobody understood what inkjet printing was. It was a new tool in the toolbox for creative people. I wanted to make sure that they understood what was out there and how the paper and the ink and the presses were working together to give the customers the best results and honestly, bypass the printers. Because if the printers didn’t have this technology, you hear what I always hear is, “No, you don’t want to do that. Why do you want to do that? It’s too complicated. It’s not going to look the way you want.” This was always a story, until they got the technology. Then miraculously, it was 20 times better than the week before.
Do your research is the moral of the story here. Pat McGrew, thank you so much for your time. Will and Jamie, the printer, thank you so much for your time as well. To everybody listening to this podcast, thank you for your time. Until next time, inkjet long and prosper.
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[0:54:06] DC: Thanks for listening to Podcasts From the Printerverse. Please subscribe, click some stars, and leave us a review. Connect with us through printmediacentr.com. We’d love to hear your feedback on our shows and topics that are of interest for future broadcasts. Until next time, thanks for joining us. Print long and prosper.
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