At drupa 2016, its third presence at the show, Ricoh’s demonstrations included a fully configured Ricoh Pro VC60000 running a variety of media roll-to-roll and roll-to-sheet, and a single engine Pro VC60000. Furthermore, color cut sheet presses including the Ricoh Pro C9110 and the Ricoh Pro C7100x with its fifth toner station were available for demo at the stand.
The Pro VC60000 is the web-fed inkjet press that Ricoh has been building with its own technology since the last drupa where it first privately discussed the idea even while it has continued to sell the webfed Infoprint inkjet series based on a Screen engine. The Pro VC60000 was demonstrated running live and printing high quality color at the Hunkeler Innovationdays in February 2015. At Hunkeler the VC60000 press was shown printing on a variety of substrates with one coater before the print engines and a varnish coater after the printing that added outstanding gloss to color images to offset substrates.
Adare SEC (Secure Essential Communications) based in Huddersfield, UK confirmed an order for two new Ricoh VC60000 color inkjet web presses at drupa. Adare’s business currently runs a raft of highspeed mono and color digital lines including eight Ricoh systems, 16 Xerox cut-sheet devices, and six Riso inkjet printers across its operations. It will swap out one of its two existing Ricoh InfoPrint 5000 duplex lines at its Huddersfield site to make way for the new VC60000s.
Visitors to the show could also see the new aqueous resin (AR) latex inks for the Ricoh Pro large format L4100 printer. Also, visitors were able to see the increased finishing capabilities with the Watkiss PowerSquare 224 booklet maker running in-line with the Pro C9100 series, Pro C7100x series, and the Ricoh Pro 8100 series digital presses. Another important addition to the Ricoh portfolio on show at drupa was the Ricoh TotalFlow Cloud Suite, a hosted portfolio of cloud-based services comprising carefully selected Ricoh software and Ricoh-endorsed thirdparty solutions.
There was an interesting corner in the stand where visitors had the opportunity to be on the cover of one of Germany’s most popular news magazines, Focus. In a demonstration of end-to-end production with Ricoh solutions, a photograph of a participating visitor was taken and a personalized magazine cover ready for collection was printed.
At a press meet at the stand, Benoit Chatelard, vice president, Production Printing, Ricoh Europe, said, “By harnessing the power of digital print and data, and by creating innovative new technologies for multichannel production and communications environments, Ricoh is providing new ways for any print service provider to transform, optimize and grow their business.” Peter Williams, executive vice president and member of the board at Ricoh Europe, said that this was Ricoh’s ‘most impressive’ ever drupa.
