Xeikon 8000 Series

Xeikon will unveil its new Xeikon 8000 Series of digital color presses at drupa 2012, taking place in Düsseldorf, Germany from May 3-16, 2012. The new series of presses, which has been developed specifically for the document printing market, makes Xeikon's highest image quality, highest productivity and lowest running costs available across its entire duplex-printing product line. This enables all users - from smaller short-run print shops to large print service providers - to take advantage of the company's top-end technology. Comprising three models, the Xeikon 8500, Xeikon 8600 and Xeikon 8800, the new series also offers Xeikon users an upgrade path for growth. In addition, all models come equipped with Xeikon's new Toner Optimization Mode (TOM), which depending on the application can reduce toner usage up to 50 percent. This Toner Optimization Mode will allow users to reduce their running costs significantly, while enabling them to compete with lower quality printing solutions for smaller job sizes and reprints.

With the launch of the Xeikon 8000 Series, all three of Xeikon's current duplex presses (Xeikon 5000, 6000 and 8000) will be standardized onto the 8000 platform. This optimizes the portfolio and provides upgrade and trade-in possibilities to current users of the Xeikon 5000 or Xeikon 6000 presses. The Xeikon 5000, which is the entry-model, mainly active in lower volume direct mail work and short run commercial print, will be superseded by the 8500. Similarly, users of the Xeikon 6000 now have an upgrade path to the new platform via the Xeikon 8600. The Xeikon 8000 is superseded by the Xeikon 8800, bringing productivity improvements not available before.

Customer-driven innovation

"The development of the new Xeikon 8000 Series is a good example of customer-driven innovation," says Danny Mertens, Xeikon's Director of Segment Marketing, Document Printing. "Staying close to customers on a daily basis enables the Xeikon team to really understand our customer's true needs. At the top of their list are image quality and format flexibility, and the need to remain profitable. We took this feedback directly back to the lab, took all the advantages of the existing 8000 press and bundled them into a new expanded series. This enabled us to bring all the advantages of our top-end technology to all our customers - from the smaller, short-run print shops to the large print service providers."

All models now feature the same high precision LED-array imaging technology used in the current Xeikon 8000 press, which combines true 1200 dpi resolution and 4-bit per spot color depth to deliver the finest commercial print quality on the market today and offers the ideal solution for microtext applications. In addition, the move up from mono-roll image development to duo-roll image development delivers much smoother solids.

Both the 8500 and 8600 models offer significant speed increases compared to their predecessors. Customers who upgrade to the 8500 will gain a speed upgrade from 130 A4/137 letter-size pages per minute (ppm) to 160 A4/170 letter-size ppm. Users upgrading to the 8600 would see a speed upgrade from 160 A4/170 letter-size ppm to 195 A4/207 letter-size ppm. All machines are speed upgradable in the field. Running costs are also considerably lower with up to 20% savings on usage part costs, mainly related to the improvements in usage parts lives. All three models, including the Xeikon 8800, come equipped with the new X-800 Digital Front End, which features a brand new state-of-the-art user interface called MyPress, built from the ground up from the input of operators in the field.

All presses in the new series retain the full format flexibility that Xeikon has become renowned for over the last 15 years. Since 1997, Xeikon presses have been able to print on webs up to 50cm (19.7 inches) wide and, due to the full rotary imaging process, unlimited in length, enabling B2 paper size formats which is a very important functionality for many print shops.