Océ Throttles Up Inkjet Market
At the front end, however, is Océ’s same proven SRA controller that drives all the company’s inkjet engines, and scaling it up for more speed and performance up is just business as usual.
Serious about inkjet
The new machines give Océ nine high-speed inkjet systems that are divided into four logical breaks, albeit with some overlap, but that’s no biggie in the day-to-day.
- Twin Series, including the ColorStream 3500 in simplex or duplex configurations;
- Compact Series, with the single-engine duplex 1000 and 1400 models;
- Dual Series, including the JetStream 1500, 2200 and 3000; and
- Wide Series, with the big 30” wide, dual-engine JetStream 2800 and 3300 systems at the top.
This broad range makes Océ the purveyor of the greatest range of high-speed production inkjet systems on the market. In fact, Océ offers about as many choices of systems and throughput as HP, Kodak and Ricoh-InfoPrint Solutions combined. There is no doubt that Océ is serious about inkjet
And it’s a good thing, too. The company has been making a slow transition from being renown as a nearly exclusively monochrome solutions vendor to being almost full color all the time. It’s cut-sheet systems, notably the VarioPrint 6000 family, are regarded by many as some of the best monochrome cut-sheet devices available, while the company’s continuous-feed systems churn out over half the digital continuous-feed pages printed in the United States and Western Europe. But black-and-white demand is flat or declining while color is on the rise. And since color toner has less than favorable economics for longer run apps, inkjet is the only viable way to put lots of color on a page at low cost.
Image quality on the ColorStream and JetStream presses looks to be competitive with that of other contenders in the market. I’ve yet to see enough similar jobs from all the players on similar media to say which is the “best” (whatever that means), but to some extent it may not matter.
