News

Last month was a quiet one for announcements, a surprise when you consider that Drupa is just around the corner.

However, two did catch my eye. Firstly, Toshiba announced it would be withdrawing from the high-resolution DVD market.

It stated it would no longer develop, make or market HD DVD players and recorders, ending the battle it had fought with Sony’s rival format, Blu-ray.

Toshiba’s HD DVD was touted as being cheaper because it was more similar to previous video technology, while Blu-ray boasted bigger recording capacity. The trend towards Sony’s technology started last year, but accelerated recently when more movie studios decided to back the Sony format for their releases.

Why do I write about this and why is it important for graphic arts markets? Well, first of all, data formats are always important. Secondly, such developments have a significant technological impact on graphic arts.

This can already be seen in an interesting news release from Sony that announced the company had teamed up with semi-conductor company Nichia to develop a smaller, cheaper Blu-ray laser unit. This unit, just 3mm thick, is expected to start appearing in Sony laptops later this year.

The interesting point about this announcement is that Nichia is the predominant supplier of violet laser diodes for the DVD market, the same diodes used in violet CTP systems. No doubt, sometime in the future, this development of new low-cost and high-power violet diodes will find its way into graphic arts products.

Partnership deal
The other key announcement last month that I want to cover concerns Konica Minolta and Océ. These two companies have entered into a partnership agreement to co-operate in development and marketing for office and production printing systems.

Both companies will examine and compare each other’s existing cut-sheet product lines to determine the optimal product mix. They will complement each other’s products in order to provide a highly competitive product line-up. The companies will then jointly develop certain output equipment for the light and mid-range production equipment market, which is expected to grow rapidly.

This arrangement should allow fast and efficient development of equipment and software that better serves diversifying customer needs. It will also secure the position of the market leader. In the sales situation, both companies will be able to choose products from the other’s product lines to enhance their sales opportunities.

This is, in reality, a continuation of the kind of agreements already in place between certain multi-national companies and Japanese-based technology suppliers. For example, HP has had a very successful similar agreement with Canon.

Elsewhere, Xerox takes equipment from its partner Fuji Xerox in both the monochrome and colour xerographic printer and MFP product areas. Also, Kodak has agreements with Canon, where Canon sells Kodak’s Digimaster production monochrome printers and Kodak sells the Canon ImagePress MVP 7000 as the NexPress M700.

This agreement between Konica Minolta and Océ, however, appears to go further in that there is first a sharing of R&D activity, as well as the sharing of current product lines between the two companies.

This means Océ will have a much stronger product line to compete against Canon, Ricoh and Xerox and also that Konica Minolta can now move up-market and aggressively compete against IBM/Ricoh and Xerox in the production monochrome and colour spaces.

Could this also mean we have seen the start of another total solutions supplier to compete in the market? It will be interesting to see if there is more to this agreement than just R&D and sharing products for sale. Could this be like the Ricoh agreement with IBM, where by 2010, Ricoh will have taken full ownership of the Infoprint business?

With the anticipated development of high-speed colour transactional and direct mail printing, as well as major growth in office colour printing, this agreement may be far more significant than at first sight.

Andrew Tribute is a journalist and consultant in digital pre-press and pre-media marketing technology. Visit: www.attributes.co.uk