Canon announced three new presses at drupa, which were arguably among the most interesting of the new presses unveiled at the show, because they mark a new direction for Canon. Yet none of these three were actually in Dusseldorf so that many visitors may have missed the full significance behind them.
The first of these new presses is the VarioPress iV7, a B2 inkjet machine that is aimed at customers in commercial printing but which I believe also has a part to play in Canon’s move into packaging. The iV7 was first announced at Canon’s press conference the day before drupa, which I have covered previously. An hour later and Peter Wolff, senior vice president and chief marketing officer for Canon Production Printing, announced it again at the Heidelberg press conference as part of a deal that will see Heidelberg rebadge it as the Jetfire 75. This combination of Canon and Heidelberg addressing different ends of the commercial print market should ensure that this press sells in reasonable numbers.
Canon’s VarioPress iV7 is a B2 inkjet press.The VarioPress iV7 is designed as a high volume press. Ronald Adams, vice president of sheetfed presses for CPP, says that the main target will be commercial printers and book publishers, noting, “We see that they are facing challenges from cost pressures, shorter runs, other applications and labor shortages” He believes that the iV7 will enable customers to move more jobs from toner devices to inkjet as well as smaller jobs from offset presses.
The new press is a B2 machine with Adams saying: “We see in commercial printing very little demand for B1. The investment rates get very high for the rest of the workflow and the finishing.” He points out that some applications, such as a folder for brochures, need larger sheet sizes than SRA3 but that B2 should be large enough for most jobs.
see also
Canon’s dual
printhead
strategy
He adds, “In commercial printing, if there’s demand for B1, it’s for more productivity, not for applications that demand the B1 size. But we can achieve quite high productivity so we don’t think we need to go to B1. And sometimes you want to have a smaller sheet if you can’t always do multiple up.”
It takes sheets up to 61×75 cm, meaning that it can print 6-up A4/ letter pages, which is a key requirement for the US market. The sheets are fed through the machine on the long edge. Most presses would work off the short edge, meaning less cost in building the press and allowing the printbars to be shorter with fewer expensive printheads. But feeding the long edge helps to improve the productivity. More importantly, it also means that Canon could quickly bring a B1 version to market, if there was demand for this.
It has a linear speed equivalent to 80 mpm, which translates into 8700 B2 4/0 impressions per hour, or 4350 B2 sheets/hour in duplex mode. Adams says that there’s a constant gap between the sheets to maintain the overall productivity, noting, “We control the sheets if they move and we also measure back where the sheet is and compensate for that as the sheets might stretch as we add more water for the duplexing.”
For now, the iV7 is a four-color machine with print bars for CMYK. However there is room for two further slots, with each slot holding two colors so that it will take a further four colors, or eight in total. There’s also one print bar set aside for Canon’s ColorGrip primer.
There is an inline scanner to check the print quality and which can compensate for some issues by adding drops of different colors. The iV7 has fully automated maintenance around the printheads. It uses the same Piezo Automated Integrated Nozzle Technology or PAINT system that Canon has been using with its wide format printers since 2010.
It’s a single engine machine so that means sending the sheets back under the press for the second side to be printed on. The transport system consists mainly of rollers and vacuum belts when the ink is wet. Adams says, “We are not using any grippers.”
Adams explains, “We hold the sheet in a vacuum and the first step is to get rid of the water in the ink and then the sheet doesn’t deform. After that we move to rollers because the sheet has stability. And that also allows us to print to lighter media.”
It has a very straight paper path with large drying racks that are designed to be very gentle on the paper. It will handle 60-450 gsm uncoated, 75-450 gsm coated and 200 – 450 gsm paperboard, with the heavier weights not affecting the print speed.
This press been designed and built at Canon Production Printing, or CPP, which was formerly Océ. The press has a modular design so parts of it are built at both of CPP’s main bases, in Venlo in The Netherlands and Poing in Germany.
The iV7 should be available in the first half of 2026. Canon has yet to decide on the price but Adams says, “We are very confident that it will be very competitive.
Ronald Adams, vice president of sheetfed presses for Canon Production Printing.Folding carton
The second of these new presses will be based on the iV7 platform but will target the folding carton market, which will mark a much more decisive move into packaging than we have seen so far from Canon. However, while the iV7 is a B2 press, the folding carton version will take substrates up to B1. This ability to scale is clearly part of the original design criteria for the iV7 platform, explaining Canon’s decision to feed the B2 sheets for its commercial press from the long edge. It should be relatively straightforward to stretch the press the extra width required for B1.
In addition, Adams notes that the the transport system from the IV7 platform should be a good fit for folding carton. He told me, “As it is targeting folding carton, it will be designed to run heavier stock. The exact specifications have not been determined yet. Also for the speed, the exact speeds have not yet been determined, but the printing speed will be similar to the iV7 in meters per minute.”
For now, the folding carton press is still at an early development stage, with Canon not having decided on a name for it. So it’s too early to talk about beta sites and Canon won’t commit to a date for its introduction but I doubt that we will see this anytime before 2026.
Corrugated press
This brings us to the third of these new presses, which is aimed at the corrugated market, and which was shown at drupa as a scale model (shown above). Roland Stasiczek, senior director business development for packaging at CPP, told me: “We have been mainly focused on commercial printing but we see our future in packaging, which is labels and corrugated.”
For corrugated, Canon is targeting post-print, meaning printing direct to board. That means a much larger press with a more robust substrate transport system, albeit still with a lot of similarities to the iV7 platform.
In this case, the boards are loaded into a feeder, with the first step then being to check the quality of the boards. Stasiczek explains. “Boards often have poor quality so we have a smoothing unit and we can reject any that aren’t good.”
This is followed by an inkjet priming unit right before the colors. This means that the primer only goes exactly where’s it’s needed, with the colors dropped precisely on top of the primer. This is the same ColorGrip system that Canon already uses in its existing inkjet presses, and will also be used in the iV7 platform.
Canon’s Corrugated Concept Press will take boards up to 1.3 x 1.7m.It can be configured with from four to seven colors with Stasiczek noting, “We believe the market will be satisfied even with four colors. But when you get into brand colors then a lot of retail packaging will have a stand up display that has to match the packaging inside.”
The transport system uses a vacuum belt. There is a camera system that can check the printed results against a master copy. Stasiczek says that the system will be able to check for variable data but that this has not been implemented yet, adding that he’s not expecting to see much variable data work as these applications are mainly short run jobs.
It will run at 80 mpm, which should equate to 8000 square meter an hour, at 1200 x 1200 dpi resolution. That would lead to roughly 3,600 boards an hour at the press’s maximum format size of 1.7 x 1.3m.
Stasiczek says that Canon has not considered offering a lower resolution mode – say 600 x 600 – to achieve a faster speed, adding, “At the moment we are aiming for the best quality and then we need to plan around how to handle different speed options.”
Canon is still experimenting to determine the optimum standoff distance between the printheads and the substrate. Stasiczek says, “The larger the gap the more robust the transport system is but the smaller gap is better for drop placement so we are figuring out how big a gap we can afford to allow the best quality.” He adds. “And we can detect a bad board and lift the heads to protect them.”
Stasiczek says that the feedback he has had so far from customers is that the new press will be a game changer if Canon can achieve all of its targets. He adds: “And we are aiming for a break even against flexo of 20-25000 square meters, so short run.”
Canon has not yet decided on a name for this press and refers to it as the Canon Corrugated Concept press. Nonetheless, the company is hoping to have the first machine installed in 2026.
Printheads
Although these three presses are targeting different markets – commercial print, folding carton and corrugated boards – they all share a common imaging system. At the heart of this is a brand new Si-MEMs piezo printhead that’s been developed by Canon. I’m going to cover this new printhead in a separate follow-up to this story, along with Canon’s thermal printheads and the water-based inks that all these presses use.
In the meantime, you can find details on the iV7 and the rest of Canon’s range of production printers from canon-europe.com.
