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While the rest of the market has plumped for drop-on-demand, and with the exclusion of HP piezo, Kodak stands alone with its Stream technology. Stream uses a radical reworking of the 40-plus-year-old continuous inkjet technology used in the firm’s Versamark machines. Kodak had a couple of technology demonstrations at the show, including a four-colour one-up web and monochrome overprinting onto a Muller Martini narrow web litho press. Overprinting will be available next year, while the colour machine is entering beta testing in 2010, with a likely configuration being a machine capable of 2,600 A4 pages per minute, using a 508-660mm wide web moving at 150-200m per minute. The firm says the technology has the potential to hit 300m per minute at a native 600dpi.

Kodak is making much of Stream’s quality, which includes a report commissioned by the company carried out by a firm called SpencerLab, which found that the concept colour press "demonstrates the potential of approaching 175-line offset print quality". Along with quality is its ability to print on both coated and uncoated standard stocks, the slight wrinkle being that those coated stocks need to be tweaked to work with the technology. This may well up the price of papers suitable for Stream, though Kodak argues that, at 25% over the price of standard stocks, it’s lower than the three to four times of stocks suitable for today’s high-speed inkjet kit. With other suppliers opting to make their machines work with the available stocks, Stream may not be as attractive as the emerging alternatives.

Format: One-up web
Size: 210mm wide
Colours: CMYK
Speed: 122m per minute (at Drupa)
Technology: Continuous inkjet
Shipping: 2010
Price: TBC