In early November, just after its launch of the Ricoh 7500 and 9500 press launches in Delhi, we had an opportunity to speak with Monotech System’s promoter and managing director TP Jain. Monotech began as a graphic arts trading company with prepress and press room products, including offset presses at one time. The company achieved its most significant success as the main distributor for Konica Minolta and built up an extensive sales and servicing network with a large footprint of installations. At the same time, it began building wide-format inkjet output devices for the signage industry. In the first half of the 2015-2016 year, Konica Minolta purchased Monotoch India’s digital press sales and service division, including its sales and servicing resources.
In 2021, after a major restructuring of the Ricoh setup in India, Monotech India became a distributor of its digital presses in the country. As Jain told us, in the past two-and-a-half years, the company has been able to sell about 350 Ricoh digital presses across the country. Jain says, “We have been able to sell these presses to good printers and establish the digital business and are trying to work with them for intricate applications where our team has domain knowledge and can come up with solutions.”
Jain is hopeful about the new Ricoh Pro C9500 and C7500, which he considers very robust devices with their versatile support for a wide range of media from 40 GSM to 470 GSM. With the same 2400 x 4800 dpi VCSEL print engine and PXP toner as the previous engines, the new presses have healthy duty cycles designed to handle monthly volumes of 1,000,000 pages and 240,000 pages, respectively, with auto duplex and perfecting capabilities up to 470 GSM.
Ricoh has improved the fuser system with a pad instead of a roller to better handle thin or synthetic media. Both the printers gain a new base controller, the Ricoh graphic communication operating system, which is compatible with external diagnostic systems and maintenance programs.
The multi-color Ricoh C7500 production engine has 5th color capabilities, expanding the color gamut to 11 colors. The 5th color toner includes gold, silver, neon pink, neon yellow, clear, white, and invisible red. The team believes the printer to be a great addition to the Indian photo industry.
Jain explains his optimism for the newly introduced devices, “Having a differentiating factor is a must to stay relevant in the market for the long term. Through the new printers with added features, we are just fulfilling the demands of our customers.”
He adds, “The Indian photo industry being very typical is not easy to address. Although HP Indigo and Revoria from Fujifilm are doing great in the industry, the addition of the 5th color toner in the Ricoh Pro C7500, where neon pink in its color gamut works as a process color rather than an additional color, enhances the color and gives the perfect skin tones required for the photo market. We have placed it in the market at a very competitive price with respect to Indigo and Revoria,” Jain said.
As we have written earlier, the current financial year has seen a significant increase in the number of new monochrome and color digital presses of all types, including drum and toner and inkjet presses installed by book printers. The strong sales momentum in Q4 in the previous year has continued into the current financial year with total installs expected to exceed even optimistic forecasts to an increase of more than 20% over the previous year.
Success in own manufacturing and great interest in Ricoh’s B2 inkjet at drupa
We asked Jain about the company’s developments in other segments. He says that to some extent, the prepress software market is becoming commoditized but that the manufacturing of inkjet output devices is doing well. He has great hopes for the wide format devices where he feels that industrial applications are catching on. As far as the company’s digital inkjet presses for the book and label markets, he is very optimistic across both domestic and export sales.
Jain says there are great expectations from new Ricoh B2 sheetfed ink presses to be demonstrated and ready for market at the forthcoming drupa in May 2024. Jain says, “Apart from the capital cost and the running cost of these machines, which we will only come to know after drupa, the Indian buyers are very keen in both web and sheetfed inkjet presses. I feel that the Ricoh B2 presses to be shown will have two possible advantages – the first being their robust inkjet heads, and secondly the use of water-based inks that are increasingly being used by several inkjet presses coming into the market.”
