New fleet of advanced Xerox systems echo fresh innovations

Today in the post-drupa 2016, Xerox opens up new ways, which they had paved during the world’s largest print expo with the showcase of latest innovations, guiding the print community into fresh business directions. In this respect, Balaji Rajagopalan, executive director-technology, channels & international business, Xerox India Limited, talks about what they subsequently bring new for the Indian market in an exclusive chat with D Ramalingam from Print & Publishing.

Be it in imaging, business process, analytics, automation and more, Xerox is known for engineering the ‘flow of work’ to provide the printing world greater productivity, efficiency and personalisation. “All across the globe, we at Xerox have become a common entity; and we aim at creating evocative innovations that can bring real difference to our partners (clients) and their customers,” says Balaji Rajagopalan. He further mentions that the overall idea is to develop best of services they can provide their partners through mutual relationship. “We act on every aspect from the grass-root level, whether it could be our supply chain or customer care through engineering services,” asserts Balaji, adding that everything at Xerox has dramatically been improving over the years. Xerox India has expanded its channel partners throughout the country.

“We have more than 150 channel partners all over India. As everybody knows our product line is stretched from the smallest MFPs to the mammoth production presses; one can find the prices of our machines ranging from INR 10k to 20 cr; so we say ‘Start with Xerox, Grow with Xerox’—this is the beauty of Xerox!” he says. Offering the choices of its machines, Xerox is now gearing up to expand customer base in the Tier II and III towns across India.

Fresh revelations

Balaji explains at length about how Xerox India has brought a new fleet of technologies, catering new business possibilities and prospects to the country’s commercial printing community. He refers the showcase they had in a recent trade expo held in Chennai, where the company unpacked a spectrum of high-power digital presses designed to offer a new landscape of printing.

The line-up was: Xerox Versant 2100 with an offset-like matte finish; Xerox Color C70 with OHCF and Embedded Fiery; Xerox Versant 80 with Embedded Fiery; Xerox ColorPress 1000i with metallic gold and silver options; and Xerox Wide-Format 6705.

Versant 2100 features new compact belt fuser drives (100 ppm speeds), supporting 52-350 gsm, auto-perfecting all weights. This system also automates colour control, creates image-to-media alignment profiles and delivers brand-managed colour in less time with less waste with an inline, integrated full width array. On other side, according to Balaji, Xerox Color C70 is best of its class print/copy/scan system capable to run at 60/70ppm/A4 colour and 65/75ppm/A4 black & white. And yet another print/copy/ scan system in the line-up, Versant 80 runs at 80 ppm/A4 in ultra HD resolution of 1200 x 1200 x 10-bit RIP rendering and 2400 x 2400 imaging resolution.

Color Press 1000i is engineered to print at 100ppm at rated speeds on all stocks from 55–350 gsm. Capable of front to back registration of +/- 0.5 mm from all trays, multi-pass technology of the machine with clear ink adds an extra dimensional feel to prints. In addition, using ECO Dry Ink technologies, inline cooling and decurler quality of the press produce outstanding stack quality. “Wide Format 6705 is a versatile system, which we present for the first time in the (south Indian) market; this machine is capable to handle long original prints of up to 25m, supporting continuous copy/print of up to 99 sheets,” explains Balaji.

Wider prospects

On the current Indian market, Balaji narrates that a significant growth has been witnessing in the segments like photo printing, book publishing and others. “This further encouraged us to constantly innovate and introduce new technologies,” he remarks, pointing at the growth seen in different regional markets, such as southern region. As on today, south Indian market contributes more than 33 percent to Xerox India’s business.

When asked about inkjet, Balaji mentions that the technology is one of the company’s growing domains in which cut-sheet is yet a focused area. “Our powerful inkjet systems are designed to make the technology more accessible and affordable to printing professionals,” he mentions. In the inkjet lineup, cut-sheet Xerox Brenva HD Production Inkjet Press and continuous feed Xerox Trivor 2400 Inkjet Press deserve special mention. Combining cost effectiveness of inkjet with flexibilities of a cut-sheet platform, Brenva HD opens up new inkjet possibilities into transactional, light direct mail and (book) publishing sectors, while Trivor 2400 is designed for broader application areas such as catalogues, magazines and colour books. Both the inkjet systems pulled crowd at drupa 2016. In the post-event, according to Balaji, Xerox has so far installed around 1000 machines of all models and configurations across the globe.

Print sustainability

About the revolution of digital presses, Balaji is quite positive about it as he says there is nothing such about digital replacing offset in the trend but complementing each other. “Even people these days talk about the shrinking of prints; of course, e-mail and smart-phones might have almost killed the tradition of printed letters. But there is still a positive side in this, involving digital presses. Today, digital presses easily print documents being transferred via online from one region to another, saving huge postal charges,” he explains.

Moreover, digital presses even help newspaper houses in big cities produce multiple short-run morning editions of their dailies simultaneously in cut-off regional locations, saving time, transport charge and cost of production. Perceiving this fact, Balaji articulates that print is no way coming to an end as ‘digital presses’ give print a new vivacity, opening a new horizon of print sustainability ever witnessed in the industry. And Xerox is at the vanguard of this innovation!