Delivering the announcement today (13 October), the Flint Group-owned manufacturer said the technology, which was developed with partner Miyakoshi and shown as the Trillium One liquid toner press last Drupa, had “encountered several challenges in bringing it to market as a commercial product” since it was first shown in prototype as the Quantum single-colour unit at Drupa 2012.
Xeikon communications manager Danny Mertens told PrintWeek the main issues with the technology related to productivity and uptime.
“We always talk about a ‘triangle’ to make a product go to market; the quality, timing and price all have to be okay,” said Mertens.
“Quality was okay but the major issue with Trillium for the past two years has been to get its productivity and uptime correct.
“We saw some technological challenges, which we probably could have overcome, but it would take time and investment and would make the product substantially more expensive, where it could possibly lose positioning in the marketplace.”
Following Drupa 2016, when the 800ppm Trillium One was shown for the first time and announced to be entering the commercial market in Q2 2017 at €2.5m (£2.2m), Mertens said Xeikon then continued to assess ways of improving uptime and productivity, with Drupa 2020 set as ultimate hard deadline to come to market, but the decision was eventually taken to “pull the plug” and refocus.
Speaking to PrintWeek earlier this year at its Xeikon Café event, then chief executive Wim Maes said the project had been delayed due to a switch in technology, moving from liquid toner based on mineral oil to vegetable oil.
Around 30 to 40 Xeikon employees working on the project will be reallocated to other areas at Xeikon’s main Lier, Belgium plant, where the machine had remained since an Ipex 2014-deal for French printer TagG Informatique to install it in beta fell through.
Mertens said the newly reallocated staff will work on taking further steps in dry toner technology and UV inkjet label printing, for which it launched four new machines at last month’s LabelExpo Europe. He did not disclose how much the project had cost.
Benoit Chatelard, Flint Group president and chief executive Digital Solutions, reaffirmed Xeikon’s positioning as “technology-agnostic” and said he remained confident that the segments it operates in can be well served with dry-toner technology and the newly launched Panther series.
