Indianapolis, March 24, 2024
HP today announced new digital presses leveraging HP's leading LEP technology, along with an expanded portfolio of intelligent solutions to optimize productivity, versatility, sustainability and TCO. This offering represents HP's leadership in the analog to digital transformation, designed to realize a more successful production floor.
Targeting the needs of printers who must overcome labor challenges and grow through increased productivity and diversification, HP is introducing the new HP Indigo 120K Digital Press, HP Indigo 18K Digital Press, and the enhanced HP Indigo 7K Secure Digital Press. The new presses are breaking boundaries between analog and digital, delivering offset look and feel with the productivity, versatility and optimized TCO of digital. Enabling offset printers to convert more jobs to digital allows them to deliver on growing customer demands by developing a simplified, more efficient, and reliable production floor.
HP continues to push the industry forward, also announcing today the commercial availability of the HP Indigo V12 Digital Press following several successful beta site installations including US-based digital and sustainable print leader, Brooke + Whittle. The HP Indigo V12 Digital Press leverages new LEPx technology capable of replacing 2 flexo presses. Rooted in an industry-winning formula, the Indigo V12 is the most productive narrow web digital press on the market. Enabling analog to digital conversion, it increases the entire capacity of the production floor.
Intelligent Productivity Accelerates the Analog to Digital Transformation
Reliability, consistent uptime, and predictable production are critical to competing effectively in the global commercial print, labels and packaging industries. With the introduction of the new HP Indigo 120K Digital Press, HP sets a new standard for high-volume production through best-in-class productivity1, labor-saving automation, offset-matching print quality, and sustainable profitability.
Seamlessly integrating into any production floor, the HP Indigo 120K Digital Press enables versatile and flexible operation that optimizes the print ecosystem. The highly automated user experience reduces human touchpoints and enables multi-press operation by a single operator. The HP Indigo 120K meets demanding turnaround times with speeds of 6,000 sheets per hour2 and up to 90% press availability3. Designed to deliver tens of thousands of B2 sheets every day, it produces over 2M B2 sheets per month.
The HP Indigo 120K offers true automated and continuous operation with continuous feeding, continuous stacking (through Auto Pallet Replacement), and continuous color measurement. Printers can save valuable time with multiple input and output paper sources, allowing a seamless and automated switchover process for jobs and paper substrates.
Shifting shorter jobs from analog to the HP Indigo 120K, PSPs can leverage all the environmental advantages of the digital printing process, which include reducing aluminum consumption, paper waste, and makeready time. In addition, with the new HP Indigo 120K ECO mode print option, they can run jobs more economically and sustainably, reducing carbon footprint by 11%4.
With AI-based innovation and automation developed for the Indigo 120K, printers can harness new capabilities for image quality troubleshooting (PQ Maestro), inspection and defect detection (AAA 2.0), and predictive press care. This automation boosts productivity while requiring less operators.
Optimization of the production floor is based on the success of HP PrintOS Suite, already mastered by over 5,000 print professionals . The introduction of PrintOS Production Beat Support for finishing and analog devices contributes to production floor management optimization. Autonomous Mobile Robots (AMRs), which automate media transfer to and from the press downstream to the finishing station and save two hours a day per press, free operators for more sophisticated tasks.
Unlocking Profitable Growth in Commercial Printing
Built upon the legacy of the world's best-selling B2 digital press5, the HP Indigo 18K Digital Press is the next generation in the versatility line, now more efficient, and easier to use, allowing printers to diversify their businesses and remain competitive. The new HP Indigo 18K's versatility goes beyond the ability to produce specialty applications. It seamlessly handles any mix of job types and substrates, with ease and productivity, to enable printers to unlock new growth opportunities. The new press supports more than 2,000 certified substrates, three quarters of which are sustainable media, and can flexibly accommodate different media thicknesses with exclusive duplex printing on thick substrates as well as smooth handling of light substrates. The press includes up to 7 color stations that can be loaded with a variety of specialty inks.
Upholding the highest standards of print quality with an offset look and feel, the HP Indigo 18K enables printers to achieve top image quality automatically through AI-based automation, HD Imaging6 which delivers exceptional smoothness and sharpness, and innovative Photo-Pro Mode which automatically applies CMYK+LLK inks on demand.
Designed to increase efficiency, the Indigo 18K simplifies operator experience through advanced AI tools that help users produce more jobs in a single shift and enable up to 80% press availability7. Boosting press productivity while working in an Enhanced Productivity Mode (EPM) enables printing 4,600 color pages per hour, which translates into 33% more productivity8, 24% energy savings per sheet9, and 25%10 cost reduction per sheet, delivering results even faster.
An Innovative Approach to Efficient Security
Building on the success of the HP Indigo 7K Digital Press, HP also announces a brand-new approach to restricted digital security printing, with its first fully secure digital solution, the HP Indigo 7K Secure Digital Press. The new 7K Secure, developed in partnership with Jura JSP, increases productivity rates by delivering all types of print jobs on one digital press, and all in one pass - enabling PSPs to print on restricted security elements and inks, double-sided with duplex sheetfed production, on a versatile substrate range.
"Our digital presses have been leading the industry through a rapidly evolving market and defining the course for print industry transformation for decades. Over 30 years ago HP Indigo sparked the digital revolution, and has continuously led the digital printing market, offering a robust and evolving portfolios designed with the mindset of driving the Analog-to-Digital transformation ever since. With the latest additions to our LEP portfolio and ecosystem of solutions, we're setting new standards for automation and sustainability in the industry - all key components that enable our customers to convert to digital easily, profitably, and successfully," says Noam Zilberstein, Vice President and General Manager HP Indigo and Scitex.
Yet presses are just one piece of the puzzle. Automation and Intelligence are key to enhancing and augmenting their capabilities and will stand at the forefront of the intelligent factory of the future. HP has set a new industry standard for automation through AI and robotics, and the most comprehensive print production automation ecosystem in the industry," added Zilberstein.
Intelligent Production Floors Pave the Way for Success
HP was the first to launch a platform for monitoring and managing presses when it announced PrintOS back in 2016, and continues to innovate and deliver exceptional efficiency across the entire production floor. HP's holistic approach to the intelligent production floor brings together the best presses and the intelligence that feeds them, from job submission to delivery.
Today HP announces PrintOS Print Beat Support for analog printing and finishing equipment, as well as HP Indigo PQ Maestro - an intelligent start-of-day wizard that optimizes press performance.
As part of HP Indigo's efforts to develop technology to increase our customers' profitable growth, the company introduces advanced print modes for jobs that can be produced more economically and efficiently. Preflight is a machine-learning algorithm which learns customers' preferences and automatically predicts suitability of the most relevant print mode, and AAA 2.0 - Auto Alert Agent advanced, is a machine-learning algorithm that increases print productivity with zero human intervention.