HP Indigo: Инновации в цифровой печати

Graphical printing division of HP Inc

HP Indigo Division is a division of HP Inc.'s Graphic Solutions Business. It was founded in 1977 in Israel and acquired by Hewlett Packard in 2001 (over a decade before the technology giant split into HP Inc. and Hewlett Packard Enterprise). HP Indigo develops, manufactures and markets digital printing solutions, including printing presses, proprietary consumables/supplies and workflow solutions. HP Indigo has offices around the world, with headquarters in Ness Ziona, Israel. Indigo is known as a pioneer of digital printing technology. Digital printing refers to the ability to print without plates or other tooling processes, and has three major benefits: it makes short runs and personalized print cost effective, it enables the use of variable data (such as text or images), and it makes just in time printing possible. As a result, digital presses have changed the economic models for printing in a wide variety of market segments, including labeling, packaging, marketing, as well as educational textbooks, journals and periodicals. These aspects are particularly important given the consolidation and diminishing profitability of traditional print segments, such as the decline of newspapers and magazines. Additionally, digital printing significantly reduces the waste of materials associated with pre press, obsolescence and warehousing. Because a digital press is capable of printing a different image for each individual impression in its output stream, digital printing enables marketing campaigns to reach consumers in more creative and engaging ways. Examples include highly targeted advertisements, seasonal and limited editions of consumables, new product introductions, and individually personalized products. The HP Indigo printing process is known for matching offset lithography's print quality and its application versatility, with the ability to print on a wide range of materials. It uses a proprietary printing process which is similar to the process used in laser printers, but with special electrostatically charged inks instead of toner, and without using a fuser, using instead a heated transfer roller to melt the charged ink particles before applying them to the paper. Up to seven inks, including the standard CMYK plus a wide range of spot colors and metallic colors, can be used simultaneously on a single press, thereby providing an extended color gamut. The user can also custom mix, load, and interchange inks as desired. Inks can be laid down in any order desired, and multiple layers of each ink are also possible. On March 10, 2020, HP announced a new speed focused architecture for LEP called LEPx. This will comprise their sixth generation of presses. The first press using LEPx, it prints at 120 linear meters per minute, and is designed to have up to 12 ink stations on press.

Indigo was the name of the company originally founded by Benny Landa in 1977. Landa, known as "the father of digital offset color printing," was born in Poland to post World War II Jewish refugee parents, who later immigrated to Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. The early years of Indigo were focused primarily on research and development. One of the earliest developments was a sheet cassette for copiers and other copier and printing related equipment. The company's first product would be a digital plotter/duplicator, bringing the tiny company (its 1991 sales totaled less than US$5 million, generating a profit of $440,000) head to head with such industry giants as Xerox and Canon. The early 1990s brought a significant change in the company. In 1993, Indigo launched the E Print 1000 at the IPEX trade show. The E Print 1000 eliminated the expense and labor of the plate printing setup process by printing directly from a computer file, thereby simultaneously enabling inexpensive short run color printing. Images not only could be readily changed, they could be changed from page to page, requiring neither additional setup nor pauses in the print run. This was made possible by the Liquid Electrophotographic (LEP) process, which employed a high speed laser scanner, along with a drum shaped photoreceptor and charged, liquid toner (composed of pigment, resin, and carrier fluid) to produce the image. In 1994 Indigo had an initial public offering on the NASDAQ stock exchange, selling 52 million shares at $20 per share and raising $100 million. At the drupa trade show in 1995, Indigo launched another product: the Omnius press. Whereas E Print focused on medium volume single sheet printing, Omnius brought digital printing to a variety of surfaces, including plastic, cardboard, film, and, especially, cans, bottles, and other packaging surfaces. Omnius was the precursor of then became Indigo's portfolio of labels and packaging presses. At the end of 1995, Indigo sales did not reach the expected levels, and the company had to downsize. Despite a rise in revenues to $165 million, the company posted its fourth year of losses, of about $40 million. However, George Soros and other investors still believed in the company's potential and increased his investment to 30 percent of Indigo's shares by 1997. By 1998, the company improved its product reliability and performance, and its revenues passed the $200 million mark for the first time. On September 6, 2001, HP announced that it would acquire the remaining outstanding shares of Indigo N. V. (NASDAQ: INDG) for approximately $629 million in HP common stock and a potential future cash payment of up to $253 million contingent upon Indigo's achievement of long term revenue goals, for an aggregate potential payment of up to $882 million. In the following years, HP continued to invest in Israel based graphic arts companies, acquiring Scitex Vision in 2005 and Nur Macroprinters in 2007. The combined presence of other employees of HP in Israel (which includes not only employees of the Indigo division, but also of Scitex and Israeli's divisions of HP Labs made HP the second largest foreign employer after Intel. In August 2009, HP announced that they had reached the milestone of 5,000 HP Indigo digital presses in operation around the world. In 2010, the trade magazine Print CEO ranked the company Number 1 in the US high volume digital press market. HP Indigo was noted to have a 75% share of the world market for digital commercial photo printing.

In March 2012, HP Indigo unveiled the fourth generation of the Indigo product portfolio, and released it to market a year later. This was the first press of their fourth generation of products, the first that went beyond the SRA3 size into oversized B2. By March 2016, when the company unveiled the Indigo 12000 (an updated version of the Indigo 10000), there were 200 Indigo 10000 customer installations in 20 countries. In February 2019, HP Indigo announced the one thousandth installation of this the fourth generation presses. In 2014, HP Indigo began installing digital presses, aimed at the flexible packaging and folding carton markets, respectively.

A key milestone for HP Graphic Arts at drupa 2016 was the introduction of PrintOS, a cloud based technology to help customers oversee their presses, manage day to day production activities, and facilitate connectivity and business growth. It is available to HP Indigo customers, as well as users of other HP technologies like Designjet and PageWide Press. In March 2019, HP said that more than 20 thousand users were connected to PrintOS. Some of the applications available for PrintOS include Site Flow, Print Beat, Box, Knowledge Zone, and Marketplace.

HP Indigo relies on a mix of press sales, consumables and services for revenue.

HP Indigo uses a proprietary, patented technology and a business model that sells both presses and their consumables, as well as services. The presses are assembled in a dedicated facility in HP's Kiryat Gat campus, and the inks are manufactured at both Kiryat Gat, Israel, and TUAS, Singapore. In 2004 HP made a 100 million shekel investment in a new production site in Kiryat Gat to manufacture HP Indigo ElectroInk. There is a sister facility in Singapore that also manufactures Indigo ElectroInk. In 2007, an adjacent hardware center was opened in Kiryat Gat. This facility assembles frames, feeders, and other components with imaging engines into finished presses, and also serves as the site for manufacturing other operator replaceable consumables. In late 2012, HP Indigo inaugurated a second ink plant in Kiryat Gat, which focuses on the manufacturing of ElectroInk for the fourth generation family of presses such as the Indigo 12000, Indigo 20000 and Indigo 30000. This 118,000 square feet facility was the first non residential building in the country, and the first HP manufacturing facility worldwide, to be certified as meeting the LEED Silver environmental standard. In 2014, HP announced that it would expand its ElectroInk manufacturing plant in TUAS, Singapore, by 10 thousand square meters, in 2015.

In recognition as one of the country's top exporters, HP Indigo received the Outstanding Exporter Prize for 2016. In 2018, HP Indigo received the Presidential Volunteer Medal (אות הנשיא למתנדב) for its activities in the non profit sector.

Early incarnations of the press (Series 1 engines) were prone to banding and ink adhesion problems. However newer models have corrected these issues. The newer models also include inline scanners and other features for constant monitoring of output image quality. Due to the use of ethylene co polymers used in the electroinks used by the Indigo printing process, there is some debate on the ability to recycle the print from Indigo presses.