Is this going to leave Epson as a niche player?
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They never were that important in the wider field of the graphic market. Sold heads to Roland, Mimaki. Mutoh, Raster Graphics and some more but they were limited to water based inks, eco-solvents and possibly a UV curing model of Mimaki. There are Epson laser printers but high speed, heavy duty office models and beyond are not their market either. For Canon it is more or less the same. Epson should have something new in a market segment unusual to them at the next Drupa that already got the addition "inkjet" Drupa in the graphic magazines here.
What HP and Fujifilm are doing is on almost all fields but the traditional printing industry where Heidelberg, Man-Roland, KoeBau, Cerutti, Goss, + Japanese manu. etc are competing one another to death. Lots of big and small offset, rotogravure print companies have closed in Europe and the ones that exist have too much capacity after long periods of overinvestment. The industry is shifting. HP and Fuji are nibbling at that market too + delivering components to that market like Fuji's offset plates. Inkjet probably becomes big in total with the fixed, single array head assemblies (up to two feet wide for example) and media running fast beneath that. Gaining market share from (web) offset, electrostatic printing, even flexo I expect. Silkscreen printing has lost to it in a big way. Specialised fields like textile and carpet printing have been changed by inkjet printing too. Even if they do not go in that area they still have components like heads to sell to the more specialised companies.
It will be difficult for companies like Kodak, Océ, KonicaMinolta, Agfa, and more to compete with giants like HP as they aim for similar markets.
Ernst Dinkla
try: [a href=\"http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Wide_Inkjet_Printers/]http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Wide_Inkjet_Printers/[/url]
