CSA’s Revamped Media Lab Is Positioned as a Resource for Inkjet Customers

Canon Solutions America (CSA) has been pursuing production inkjet with a vengeance. Just last month, the company unveiled its new Océ VarioPrint i300 cutsheet production inkjet press (the long-awaited device originally code-named Niagara), as well as new Océ ImageStream 2400 and the ColorStream 3000Z continuous-feed production inkjet presses. Along with the equipment comes customer support and service initiatives, and to that end, CSA has recently opened its newly revamped and expanded Media Lab. The lab is designed to extensively test as wide a variety of papers as possible, the goal being to provide a database of papers for CSA customers that indicates how different papers perform on CSA’s inkjet equipment.

“We’ve always had a media lab within PPS [Production Print Solutions],” said John Crumbaugh, Media & Ink Product Marketing Manager for Canon Solutions America. “The original media lab was primarily designed as a service function to benefit the customer.” Begun back when toner was the imaging technology of choice, the lab existed to respond to customers who were having specific problem with their equipment. The lab would determine if it was the paper that was causing the problem. As CSA has changed its own focus, so, too, did the Media Lab need to change. “As inkjet has become more and more of our business, we’re really becoming an inkjet company,” said Crumbaugh. And in inkjet, paper performance is a lot less assured than in other printing technologies. “You need to test it and make sure it works, evaluate it, see if you can make good recommendations to customers.” Recognizing that the existing media lab wasn’t as fully equipped and staffed as it needed to be to evaluate substrates for CSA’s major product lines—particularly with the i300 on the horizon—two years ago CSA began the process of moving to a larger location in the company’s Boca Raton, FL, facility, and acquiring more equipment and staff. The new Media Lab was up and running by January of this year.

One of the benefits of the expanded facility is just sheer volume, the ability to test more paper samples. The original lab had a database of about 100 substrates; two-and-a-half years later, the lab has data on nearly a thousand, with detailed information about how those papers perform on CSA’s various inkjet platforms.

A key to fulfilling the lab’s mission is its relationship with paper mills, and the ability to remain completely objective in its paper evaluation. “We don’t play favorites, and we don’t have any mill relationships that are monetarily based,” said Crumbaugh. “We work with technical teams at over 30 different paper mills, and sometimes we’ll go as far as working with them to develop a new paper to meet one of our customer’s needs.”

The relationship benefits the paper companies as well.

“Paper companies are good at producing and developing new papers, but what they don’t have is printers or the expertise in inkjet,” said Crumbaugh. “So we really work very much as partners. We’ll bring their staff in and we’ll do paper trials so they can see the performance of the paper.”

Production inkjet, at least at present, is in a state of continual improvement in terms of inks and presses, which keeps the Media Lab pretty busy. And of course paper is evolving, too.

“Each year, new papers come out, and each mill is adding new papers at a fairly rapid pace,” said Crumbaugh. “Every paper mill almost bar none realizes that inkjet is their growth potential and opportunity. That’s where the market’s heading so they’re all coming up with new products and they come to us to see if those products will work.”

The end result of all the testing is an extensive database that at present exists—appropriately—on paper, with an electronic version due this summer. “It’s a list of papers that are categorized by their different attributes, and that helps our customers determine which paper is going to fit their needs,” said Crumbaugh. “It’s all about choice.”

Another feature of the new Media Lab is to send “push” notifications to customers alerting them to new papers that work on which piece of equipment. “It’s our job as an OEM to let them know that there’s something new that works,” said Crumbaugh. “Maybe it benefits them, maybe it doesn’t but it has no benefit if you don’t know about it.”

And, to be fair, sometimes the job is to alert customers that a paper may not work particularly well. “Sometimes that’s the case,” he said “This is just not a good fit. The nice thing with inkjet is, if one paper is not a good choice, generally there’s another manufacturer that has a paper that is a good choice.”

The Boca Raton Media Lab shares data with CSA’s facilities in Poing, Germany, and Venlo, The Netherlands, to comprise a truly international paper testing program.

Ultimately, the goal of the Media Lab is to offer CSA’s customers with choices, and data to back up those choices. “We still have the service function,” said Crumbaugh, “so when the customer does get a bad batch of paper or their operator orders the wrong paper, we’re able to respond very quickly and get them back up and running.

“The mission of the lab is to keep that customer cranking through, and keep that press running.”