Heidelberg beats Xerox to digital colour punch.

Heidelberg is currently equipping its digital Digimaster 9110 black and white press with CSP software to recognize and process practically all the popular file formats used in computer centres in the commercial, administration, banking and insurance sectors.

“Our goal is to dispossess Xerox of between 600 to 800 systems per annum with our Digimaster printing system,” said Holger Reichardt, Heidelberg’s marketing and sales director. He maintains the Digimaster has the potential for 12,000 installations in the next five years. The company has sold 2,000 machines in 20 months. Its aim is to secure a 30% market share of the total digital market.

Heidelberg is also claiming to have stolen a march on Xerox with the announcement that its high-end NexPress 2100 digital colour press will be available for sale from Print 2001 in September, six months ahead of competitor Xerox FutureColor.

The range of Indigo digital colour presses, well head of rival Xeikon, currently dominates this high-end colour digital printing sector.

Xerox CEO, Ann Mulcahy at a press conference in New York, vigorously opposed the Heidelberg challenge when she emphasised that Xerox saw its future as a provider of colour digital printing. She downplayed the significance of the NexPress.

“FutureColor represents a quantum leap in technology, while the NexPress 2100 will offer no new technology breakthroughs and will not run much faster but will be over twice the price,” she said.

Xerox already claims first place in the production colour printing market with a 70% market share generating US $15billion. Growth last year was 62%. It recently shipped its 2,000th DocuColor, and is positioning the DC 2000 as the “Now Press” because it is already in the market. “Competitors like Heidelberg and Canon also see this opportunity, but NexPress is still not launched and the CLC 5000 has technology that is a generation behind, ” said Mulcahy

In reply NexPress chief marketing officer Chris Payne said, “We don’t see the NexPress 2100 and the DocuColor 2060 as competing products at all. The 2060 was developed from copier technology whereas the NexPress is a solid production press built for commercial and industrial use.”

As part of the Xerox strategy to enter the colour printing market it also signed a deal with Scitex Digital Printing to sell the Versamark high speed 2,000ppm inkjet press.