Digital printers pursuing more of world's pages

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"The advantage of digital is it allows a whole new set of prints that you cannot do cost-effectively with analog: photo specialty albums or on-demand books, personalized magazines and maybe personalized newspapers in the future, targeted brochures, catalogs that are built based on who you are and what you're interested in," Nigro said.

Kodak's success will hinge on how well it prevails against more entrenched competitors such as Xerox, its historic cross-town rival, and Palo Alto, Calif.-based HP, which is unveiling this week a four-color Inkjet Web Press that prints more than 400 feet a minute.

Other companies with new commercial-scale digital printers at Drupa include Oce NV of the Netherlands, Agfa, and Ricoh/IBM. And Xerox is introducing a new ink gel that's intended to make its commercial printers' colors brighter, last longer and adhere to surfaces such as foil and plastic.

"There will be all varieties of inkjet and other digital technologies brought to market for the first time," said Bill Lamparter of PrintCom Consulting Group in Waxhaw, N.C. "We've seen most of them but certainly not all of them. We think Kodak stands out in the crowd."

After slogging through a four-year digital makeover, Kodak is banking on replacing the high profit margins it once made from film with ink revenue from new lines of printers for both consumer photography and commercial printing.

"The main attribute of digital at the highest level is the flexibility because you can customize each pixel and each page," said Kevin Joyce, chief marketing officer at Kodak's graphic communications group. "That is the game changer."

"You can imagine a day," echoed Troy of Citigroup, "when page 6 of The Economist magazine will have an advertisement that's focused on Matt Troy. All of a sudden, that advertisement speaks directly to me."

The biggest limitation has been speed because the fastest offset printers can produce about 3,000 feet of pages a minute, but "you cannot do anything but fixed-image static printing," Lamparter said.

"With inkjet or toner digital processes, I can personalize it, I can specialize it," he said. "It's an entire system, and it starts with your data-gathering, how you handle and analyze the data and structure printed materials based on that data. It is a very big deal. What it does is it enables printers to send a marketing message tailored to you."

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