HP today announced its best-ever Ipex results, surpassing company expectations for customer sales and prospects, at the exhibition in Birmingham, UK, in May.
“In addition to the international scope of the business conducted at Ipex, it was significant that more than 50 percent of the sales and leads were from companies newly embracing digital systems,” said Christopher Morgan, senior vice president, Graphics Solutions Business, HP. “Ipex affirms the fact that digital printing is now mainstream and no longer the newcomer.”
Positive signs for sign and display activity
HP’s Sign and Display operation also did brisk business at the show, both with its core customer base and with businesses in the production printing space considering entry into the large format market.
For the latter, the new HP Designjet Z5200 PostScript® Printer making its debut at Ipex proved popular. Suited for a broad range of applications, the 1.12m (44in) printer includes new HP Instant Printing Pro software that offers fast, easy file preparation and automates production tasks.
For sign and display print service providers (PSPs), the first HP Scitex large format printers using HP Latex Inks the 3.2m (126in) HP Scitex LX800 and 2.6m (104in) HP Scitex LX600 – were top sellers. As the largest, most productive HP Latex Ink device to date, the HP Scitex LX800 Printer launched at the show sets a new image-quality standard for the industrial large format market.
During Ipex HP also announced that it is working with Quad/Graphics, one of the world’s leading printers of magazines, catalogues, direct mail and other commercial products, on a plan to host the first commercial beta test of the HP Color Print Module imager. The advanced imager, which uses HP Scalable Printing Technology thermal inkjet imaging, helps print service providers integrate cost-effective four-colour process digital printing into traditional web offset press lines.
With the largest stand at Ipex, HP not only demonstrated its new digital printing systems, but also showcased the breadth of its digital solutions and services. These included HP SmartStream workflow and finishing capabilities, expansion of the Capture Business Success Program to help PSPs grow their digital print businesses a new Graphic Solutions Services organisation to increase efficiency and lower cost, together with comprehensive financing services and environmental advances.
During the course of the exhibition, HP printed more than 750,000 A4 pages for the Born Free Foundation, an international wildlife charity working throughout the world to stop individual wild animal suffering and protect threatened species in the wild.