Indigo Press Is First Universal Production Device

The HP Indigo press 5000 has been acknowledged at the first true universal production device in a report produced by Infotrends.

The HP Indigo press 5000 has been acknowledged at the first true universal production device in a report produced by Infotrends.

The term 'universal', defined by Infotrends as 'a press that cost-effectively prints in colour and monochrome modes', is applied to the HP Indigo press 5000, said Hewlett-Packard.

Following enhancements, the HP Indigo press 5000 is now claimed to achieve 100 per cent faster print speeds for monochrome (1/0) printing with up to 16,000 impressions per hour, or 272 pages per minute.

The report said: "HP Indigo's press 5000 is the first example of a device that truly addresses universal production, not only from a cost perspective (which can be done by lowering consumable and service pricing for monochrome) but also through engineering changes that make it more attractive to print black-only pages on a colour device (for example, increased monochrome speed)." Infotrends' research shows that a quarter of mono pages are printed on colour devices in a print-on-demand environment and 22.6 per cent of this mono print is produced on high-speed colour devices.

HP commented that following new enhancements to the Indigo press 5000 in January it is now cost and time-effective to print one and two colour jobs on the colour press, as well as jobs combining mono pages with full colour pages.

Research by HP found that the number of one and two colour pages produced by Indigo press 5000 users was 17 per cent of total output.

Alon Bar-Shany vice president and general manager of HP's Indigo Division, commented: "Whilst colour volumes are expected to grow, we recognise that with the new speed and cost improvements that can be achieved with the Indigo 5000, users will double the number of pages that are printed in single colour and two-colour." He added: "Print service providers now have the flexibility to print a wider range of applications on a single device, without it having an impact on their bottom line.

This eliminates the need to create or implement new workflows to print occasional single-colour jobs on a separate device." Featuring new software editions and hardware options, HP's top-selling seven-colour digital press is said to be optimised to print manuals, variable-data statements, transactional documents and other materials that require extensive single colour printing.

The company added that with the increased digital production of a variety of products, the HP Indigo press 5000 also facilitates a more streamlined production process for the printing of books for example, where text pages in mono can be printed alongside full colour pictures and graphics, as well as postcards, where full colour is printed on one side and mono the other.

Jon Bailey, the sales director of Proco UK, said: "Following upgrades to our Indigo 5000, we increased the speed of our mono output by 100 perc ent.

Printing mono jobs at 16,000 single colour impressions per hour is cost-effective, broadening the scope of jobs that are viable to print digitally.

The Indigo 5000 is ideally suited to print service providers like us, who need to run mono, highlighted and mixed jobs productively and cost-effectively." The Indigo 5000 also includes HP Professional Pantone technology, upgraded operations software and a higher-capacity proof tray.

It offers on-press four-colour (CMYK) Pantone emulation for simulating Pantone Matching System colours, said HP.

The new system is claimed to give users even better colour consistency by automatically matching multiple colours on a single job.

The Infotrends report also highlighted that the monochrome production speed of the Indigo 5000 is more than twice as fast as its competitors and it is the only digital press with seven-colour output capability.

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