Speculation surrounding Heidelberg’s entry into wide format continues to grow

Written by Gareth Ward | 20 December 2011

Litho press giant Heidelberg is taking a watching brief over how it moves into wide format inkjet printing. It currently has a distribution deal with Efi for the North American market, but has nothing to show to customers elsewhere in the world despite a growing demand from printers to offer a one stop shop service covering display print as well as sheetfed litho.

Heidelberg is starting to provide customers with a web to print tool which it says can be useful for attracting new types of business like photobooks, business cards and greetings cards directly from consumers. Adding a banner or poster printing service would appear a logical extension to this.

Board member Marcel Kiessling (pictured) says: “We distribute Efi’s Vutek products in North America and we want to see how that develops over the next couple of months. We may decide to roll that deal out over other parts of the world.

“By integrating Vutek into our Prinect production network and colour management we can achieve a better colour accuracy and repeatability from the inkjet machines.”
However, Heidelberg may be looking also an entry level device. This is because it has had success with the Ricoh production quality electrophotographic presses. Its machines are considerably less expensive than top of the range digital printing machines from Xerox, Kodak and HP, but offer similar levels of quality for printers that want to minimise their investment costs in a new sector.

It would be no surprise if Heidelberg were to repeat this approach with a relatively low cost wide format inkjet machine that offered very high quality printing.
www.heidelberg.com