Hewlett Packard, the maker of personal computers and printers, is moving forward with a plan to increase its digital printing offerings as part of a trend toward a reduction in analog printing.
Fresh from a number of significant acquisitions, HP has introduced a series of graphic arts products and technologies to enhance digital printing, saying it aims to be “the global leader in digital graphic arts.”
“We are going to lead the” transformation “of moving from analog to digital,” Yariv Avisar, vice president and general manager of large-format printing industrial solutions for HP’s imaging and printing group, said in an interview on the sidelines of a conference in Tel Aviv.
This conversion is “our main strategy,” he said. “All these acquisitions and products and activities that we are doing is mainly to accelerate this conversion.”
In its most recent acquisition, HP completed the $118.4 million purchase last week of NUR Macroprinters, an Israeli maker of industrial wide-format digital inkjet printers.
While only about 9 percent of all pages in the world are printed digitally, digital pages are growing more numerous much faster than analog ones, said Stephen Nigro, senior vice president of graphics and imaging business at HP.
“We’re on the cusp with a lot of the sort of innovation coming from HP and others in the industry so that you’ll see an acceleration of the shift from analog to digital,” he said. “That shift mostly will happen in the graphics base.”
Among HPs new offerings are a high-speed 76-centimeter, or 30-inch, inkjet platform for high-volume production of books, newspapers and direct marketing materials, new latex printing technologies and an expanded portfolio of HP Indigo presses.
Along with NUR, HP has made two other acquisitions in the graphic arts field in the past two-and-a-half years: an Israeli printer maker, Scitex Vision; and MacDermid Colorspan, a U.S….