The events will mark the arrival of the range in those countries, followed by a phased rollout initially in France and Spain, and then other countries in the coming months.

Fujifilm Business Innovation is said to be the number one supplier of A3 multifunction printers in the Asia Pacific region. Prior to the European launch, none of these devices had been available under the Fujifilm brand except in the Asia Pacific region.

Fujifilm will be offering the A3 multifunction printers, Apeos series, with a focus on productivity, reliability, and growing demands in the work environment. The printers are explained to provide uncompromising usability, enhanced security, with quick and simple operability to support user’s success in Europe.

Built on Fujifilm’s decades of print knowledge, the Apeos range is designed for the modern workplace. From remote/mobile printing capabilities to security features, including its BLI security validation (Keypoint Intelligence) and sustainability credentials, Apeos is a multifunction printer range capable of supporting digital transformation to meet the rapidly changing and diverse demands of the post-Covid environment.

A described key feature of the Apeos series is its quality. The series has a print resolution of 1200 x 2400dpi, capable of printing on versatile media with speeds ranging from 20-70 pages per minute. The range’s IReCT, digital image adjustment technology, minimises colour mis-registration. The useability/reliability of the range means accelerated operations with no wait time, supported by its described easy navigation with UI and attention light.

The series has adopted IH fusing technologies that reduce energy consumption. Also equipped with LED printheads that enables energy saving design, means the range of printers is sustainable. The developed super EA-Eco toner contributes to reducing power consumption achieving low-temperature fusing.

Advanced scanning functions support the digitalisation process with features including searchable OCR, automatic orientation of scanned page to upright position and correcting the skewed page or removing blank pages.

Taku Ueno, senior vice president, device technology division of Fujifilm Europe, commented, ’It’s hugely exciting to be entering the European office printer market after our entry into the toner production printer business in Europe in 2021. We’ve had tremendous success in the last three years introducing high quality Fujifilm branded production printers to the market, and the launch of our office printers is the natural next step.’

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The one-day virtual conference, which is free to attend, will showcase how businesses can adopt connected packaging to create engaging customer experiences, gather valuable first-party data and drive increased sales. Attendees will gain insights into the evolving landscape and discover new strategies to enhance their brand’s competitiveness in our digital world.

The Global Connected Packaging Summit 2024 will feature discussions and presentations from Ivan Gonzalez, CEO at online recycling platform Recycl3r, Thomas Vollmuth, head of brand owner management at developer of print technologies Koenig and Bauer, Gavin Ger, CEO and founder at Australian technology company Laava, and Mohamed Bassyouny, business development manager at packaging solutions supplier SIG.

Other speakers include Steve Wardle, senior manager for design operations and process at sustainable food company Kellanova, Rachel Sheldon, sustainability and innovation manager UK & IRE at sustainable plastic packaging specialist Greiner Packaging, Gregor Murray, from brand advisors Digital Commerce Global, Alice Rackley, CEO at QR code company Polytag and Katie Livesley, managing partner for digital display at customer growth agency Dentsu UK.

The speakers will share insights and expertise on key topics including QR codes, NFC, RFID, AR, AI, sustainability, reuse, innovative packaging approaches and how to effectively implement connected packaging. With more speakers to be announced in the next few weeks, attendees will also have the opportunity to network with a diverse range of industry professionals.

Last year’s event saw over 400 attendees including brands such as SIG, Kelloggs, Amazon, Tetra Pak, Danone and The PackHub. Attendees this year include Tetra Pak, Nestle, SIG, Laava, Recycl3r, Amazon and Greiner Packaging among others.

According to research from creative technology studio and conference organiser Appetite Creative in its third annual connected packaging survey released earlier this year there has been sustained interest in connected packaging over the last 12 months, with 82% of those surveyed stating they have used connected packaging, slightly more than the 81% that said so in the survey released in 2023, and considerably more than the 54% that stated this in 2022.

The conference will be presented by Jenny Stanley, managing director at Appetite Creative, who will seek to help attendees explore the value connected packaging can deliver across meaningful, unique and personalised customer engagement.

Ms Stanley commented, ‘We’re pleased to once again host the Global Connected Packaging Summit, and to welcome a wide range of experts to share their invaluable perspectives on the future of connected packaging and its impact on consumer engagement and brand experiences.

‘Our recent research shows the perceived value of data collection through connected packaging rising, especially in the context of the imminent demise of third-party cookie data. I’m looking forward to uncovering new ways brands can tap into this evolving technology.’

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Visitors will have the opportunity to learn about the latest developments in signage and speak with experts about how new products and options can help their businesses grow.

Drytac products will be present at Mimaki’s booth, where visitors can see Drytac’s ViziPrint Clear, ViziPrint Deco +, Polar Chrome and both Retac Canvas and Retac Linen being run on Mimaki machinery.

Drytac’s Polar Dynamic Sand will be featured on the Vanguard Digital Printing Systems and Durst Group stand. Elsewhere, Fujifilm will be using Drytac’s Viziprint Impress Clear as part of its live product demonstrations on its booth, while Epson America will showcase the qualities of Polar Grip Air.

Attendees can also visit the Mutoh America stand to view live demonstrations of Drytac’s ReTac Smooth throughout the event. ReTac Smooth will also feature on the swissQprint America stand alongside ReTac Textures Woodgrain.

In addition, Drytac partner HP will demonstrate both Viziprint Impress Clear and SpotOn Clear on its printing machinery.

Glen Fitzgerald, director of sales for the Americas at Drytac commented, ‘The ISA Sign Expo is a highly important event on our US calendar. Running our products on machines from several manufacturers will showcase the flexibility and adaptability of Drytac solutions, as well as the overall quality of these products.’

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Hollywood Monster is the first company to complete an installation using the completely PVC free product from Contra Vision. Tasked with developing signage for the front of the Nottingham Universal Cinema for an upcoming film release, Hollywood Monster used Contra Vision Advance as an aesthetically pleasing and sustainable solution. The new graphics and signage will be used across 11 Universal cinema sites.

The Contra Vision Advance product serves as a lower carbon footprint alternative to PVC signage. With years of research into this product, Hollywood Monster was certain that working with Contra Vision was the best decision for the project.

The company is actively committed to implementing sustainable products and partnering with companies with the same values. The latest product from Contra Vision, used in this application produces less CO2 because of its PET films whilst maintaining durability and affordability. Additionally, with perforated window films, solar heat gain is minimised in buildings such as cinemas, meaning a decrease in air conditioning requirements.

Adam Paget, head of sales of EMEA and APAC at Contra Vision said, ‘We’re excited to work with Hollywood Monster on the launch of our first PVC Free one-way vision film.

Having developed Contra Vision Advance over a number of years, we see its first use as a positive step towards a more sustainable display graphics market.’

Faye Ganderton, internal project delivery manager at Hollywood Monster had this to say about the project, ‘We’re proud to have been selected for this project and look forward to bringing sustainable signage across Universal Cinemas. The result was a combination of beautiful graphics and the innovative new product from Contra Vision.’

Available in two transparencies (30% or 40%), Contra Vision Advance is a product that offers a blend of practical benefits and environmental sustainability for Universal Cinema.

The Contra Vision Advance was supplied to Hollywood Monster by Premier. In addition, Hollywood Monster elected to Carbon Capture its Contra Vision Advance purchases, further enhancing the sustainability of this project.

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Mr Mashis a former CEO of the British Coatings Federation, which serves the paint, wallpaper and printing ink industries in the UK. Born in Guildford, Surrey, he was educated at the Stationers’ Company’s School in London, read chemistry at University College London and gained an MBA after studying at Manchester Business School and the Institute Supérieure des Affaires in Paris. He spent 27 years with ICI and AstraZeneca in a range of international business development, procurement and change roles in the plastics, refrigeration gas, agrochemical and coatings sectors and later worked for British, American, Japanese and Australian companies and spent a total of 16 years working in the USA, where he took American citizenship.

He joined the Court of the Company in 2014 and has since chaired the Industry and the Marketing Advisory Committees. He is now the Treasurer of the Friends of the Stationers’ Foundation in the USA.

Meanwhile, a total of 18 companies have been shortlisted for the Stationers’ Company Innovation Excellence Awards 2023. Now in their ninth year, the awards were established to recognise innovation within the communications and content industries. They are sponsored by print industry body Picon and Mathys and Squire.

The awards have been judged by a panel of nine, who reviewed applications from novel products, services and business processes with a positive financial and ESG impact on customers and on the environment. Winners will be selected for Business Process, Communications Including Marketing, Customer Experience, Product Design, Service Development and Start-up.

The awards event will be held at a luncheon at Stationers’ Hall on 25 September 2023; nominees inlcude Rose Calendars, Xerox, Renz (UK) and Parkside Flexibles.

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The Award categories are: Business Process; Communications and Marketing; Customer Experience; Product Design; Service Development, with a separate category for Start-ups. Now in their ninth year, the Awards are free to enter, and are open to all – entrants do not have to be members of the Stationers’ Company. Entries can be made in more than one category, and an overall Innovator of the Year is selected from the winners of each category.

The judges are keen to see applications that focus on novel products, services or business processes that have a positive financial and/or social impact on customers and on the environment. The Judging criteria are available on the Sttaioners’ website.

Overall winners of the last three years’ Innovator of the Year Award were Xerox in 2022 for the Xerox ElemX printer; the Turn on the Subtitles global marketing campaign of the same name in 2021; and Heidelberg for Heidelberg Assistant in 2019, the 2020 event being cancelled due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

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Held at Stationers’ Hall in the City of London on 25 June, the awards ‘recognise the key role the communications and content industries play in the UK economy, highlighting outstanding innovation in the sector and offering the opportunity to share best practice.’

There were six award categories, as well as the overall Innovator of the Year award. Heidelberg was recognised for its online portal, Heidelberg Assistant, which the company has made a key part of its plans for the years ahead.  

Contract Originators won the Business Process award for its new plate technology, Optimus, with the Communications award going to Transmedia Storyteller for its Conducttr software. Colop UK’s e-mark mobile marking device was recognised in the Product Design category and SaicaPack North was presented with the gong for Product Performance thanks to the success of its water-based inks.  Finally Auris Tech took home the Service Development award for its Fonetti library of illustrated books.

‘This year has seen a continued expansion of innovation applied to service and customer experience, a growing cluster of entries from the education sector and, for the first time, entries seriously focused on the Internet of Things,’ said chairman of the awards Jill Jones. ‘The judges had a difficult job selecting winners in the highly contested categories but the voting was unanimous for Innovator of the Year, Heidelberg UK, which describes its entry as the industrial Internet of Things.’
 

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In his first keynote speech at Connect 2019, EFI’s 20th annual user conference, new CEO Bill Muir emphasised his commitment to “keeping the innovation engine alive and well”.

Joking to the audience of some 900 attendees – more than a quarter of whom were from outside the US – that this was Day 99 of his employment and that he was expected to take responsibility for everything from Day 100, Mr Muir focused on the accelerating rate of change that technology has brought in the last 30 years, pointing out that technology develops exponentially while businesses grow logarithmically, which can lead to a potentially dangerous “bifurcation” between a company and its customers.

While giving away nothing in terms of specific product announcements, he praised the “managerial courage” it had taken to pivot EFI’s business from the original Fiery platform via the Print Café project of the early 2000s to the company’s success in the wide-format sector in more recent years. He pointed out that the rumours of print’s demise had been exaggerated and that although the industry’s total value has yet to recover to its peak of 2007, it has been growing consistently at a compound rate of 1.5% since 2011.

Quoting a range of business leaders, including Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and more unexpectedly, Michelangelo, Mr Muir stressed that his responsibility was to help keep the innovations coming to help EFI’s customers in their businesses. By focusing on company culture and “customer obsession”, he said that the third factor that he had to worry about – capital – ‘would take care of itself’.

The theme of print being alive and well was repeated in the “fireside chat” where Mr Muir interviewed Joe Popolo, CEO of the Freeman Company, a US$3 billion firm that specialises in branding for live events, with offices in eight countries. ‘I laugh when I hear print is dead,’ said Mr Popolo, adding that his firm is producing 10 million square feet a year of print on its fleet of 17 Vutek wide format printers.

New CEO Bill Muir promises ‘more change in the next five years than in the last 30’ but to keep the innovation engine running smoothly.

State of the products

The second day of the conference included briefings on each of EFI’s product groups. CFO Marc Olin said that the display graphics part of the business, responsible for the Vutek range of wide-format printers, had seen the biggest changes in the last six years, with expansion into the entry- and mid-level sectors where sub-60in (1.5m) at ‘an approachable price’ proving successful. Products in this category include the Vutek Pro 24f flatbed and 32r roll-fed machines, while the h3/h5 hybrid (see last issue’s Product Focus for an in-depth description) is a new mid-range introduction that Mr Olin said is receiving positive customer feedback from early adopters, as is the FabriVu 340i dye sublimation textile printer which features an integrated calendar.

He reported that the packaging line – effectively the Nozomi corrugated printer, in hardware terms – was making ‘tremendous progress’ with 15 installations around the world and the first repeat orders now arriving. While EFI had aimed the printer at corrugated packaging converters, customers such as McGowan’s in Dublin and Delta Group in London are also using it for PoS; apparently one customer has adapted the unit for roll-feeding, though Mr Olin stressed that EFI doesn’t recommend that. New features for the Nozomi include the availability of white ink which can be underprinted to provide good colour reproduction on kraft board, and enhanced top-feeder for thinner materials such as types F and G flute/microflute and an enhanced pre-coater with easier maintenance and anilox roller change to extend the range of supported substrates, including nonrigid ones such as carton board.

A choice of printing modes on the Nozomi allow colour gamut, resolution and ink usage to be traded off for different applications. Photo mode, when employed on a machine with the additional orange and violet inks, can hit 97% of the Pantone spot colours, while CMYK-only PoP mode can match ISO 12647-2 offset print specification while adding a high gloss finish to mottled or non-white boards; Eco mode drops resolution and cuts colour gamut but saves ink on products where lower quality is acceptable.

Another growth area has been in textiles where the 24 months following the acquisition of Reggiani culminated in the November 2018 launch of the Bolt single-pass industrial digital textile printer, described as ‘Nozomi for textiles’ and capable of 90sqm/min, while support for up to 12 colours is said to increase both accuracy and vibrancy. The Bolt printer is complemented by the Terra pigment inks that eliminate some of the washing and drying steps required in fabric printing, saving water, energy and time. New variants on the Bolt platform will appear in 2019, with further environmental improvements.

The DFE segment is the oldest part of EFI’s business. New higher performance versions of the Fiery hardware were announced at Connect (see News, page 4), along with software-based improvements to colour accuracy and the implementation of the Fiery Driven Printroom, a unified software interface that allows operators to interrogate and manage all of EFI’s output devices, plus any third-party print engine driven by a Fiery controller, simplifying both training and production management. EFI IQ is a new Cloud-based service based on data aggregation that will be rolled out later in the year; we will report on it in due course.

Ecosystem services

The software side of the business was covered by general manager of productivity software Gaby Matsliach who explained how the “ecosystem” around the MIS and related products had been extended last year to address more specific market segments, from corrugated converters (not necessarily using digital print) to publication to enterprise versions, reflecting increased uptake of the existing Productivity Suites and a growing number of partnerships. This is backed by what Mr Matsliach called an ‘improved discovery process’, involving audit and “ecosystem consultancy” around customers’ businesses as part of the pre-sales approach. In terms of product releases, he introduced version 7 of the Productivity Suites, which will be available in the second quarter of 2019. The new features and functionality are specific to each Suite – for details of these and the extension of the MarketDirect brand to encompass EFI’s Digital StoreFront web-to-print software, see here.

Bill Muir ended his keynote with the comment that EFI customers who had repeatedly attended Connect were telling him that every year they learn something that they can take away to make their businesses better. If you couldn’t make it this year, maybe this report helps. 

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The 2019 conference will explore ‘how businesses can be truly sustainable in all areas by having an innovative and creative mind-set’. Speakers, including professionals from Channel 4, Newsworks, Nestlé, HP and Communisis, will share their insights, real-world experience and best practice.

The conference will also feature a panel debate discussing Brexit, giving attendees the chance to look at the UK from an external point of view. The panel will be chaired by Charles Jarrold, BPIF’s CEO and will also feature Sabine Geldermann, director, drupa; Beatrice Klose, secretary general, Intergraf; Professor George Lodorfos, dean of Leeds Business School, Michael Carroll, senior packaging specialist, lead on innovation and sustainability for Nestle and Rob Shaw, CEO, Jaywing UK and Australia.

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Jon Pritchard, Grahame Megilley, Steve Lakin and David Evans bring some 90 years of combined market experience to the new team, which as well as helping customers take advantage of the latest opportunities in packaging and commercial print, is also focused on ensuring every member of staff in the industrial print business unit is equipped with the skills, processes and data to collaborate quickly and consistently to meet customers’ needs.

Mr Pritchard leads the new unit, while Mr Megilley and Mr Evans will be responsible for the growth of inkjet sheet-fed press sales across the country, including the AccurioJet KM-1 UV inkjet press and the MGI digital spot varnish and hot foil embellishment presses. Mr Lakin will be solely responsible for web-based industrial print across the UK, with the AccurioLabel 190 digital toner press and MGI 3DW spot varnish and hot foil embellishment line.

‘I’m immensely proud to lead this highly experienced team of print professionals and help Konica Minolta customers enter a new era of digital innovation,’ said Jon Pritchard, industrial print business unit leader. ‘This wealth of talent, in tandem with the company’s leading-edge portfolio of industrial printing solutions, will enable customers to capitalise on the latest innovations, lower their cost of operation and move ahead of their competitors. This is an exciting time of change in the industrial printing market – and Konica Minolta is uniquely poised to lead that change.’

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