Canon's two new colour production cutsheet presses features a new toner, laser imaging and colour calibration technology, according to Puneet Datta, the director, professional printing products, "Will bridge the gap between Canon's imageRunner C9000 series, which has a duty cycle of 350,000 A4 pages and a maximum speed of 80ppm, and the imagePress C6011S, which has a duty cycle of 700,000 pages and prints up to 61.7ppm."

Canon's six year journey began with the installation of the VP 7000 in Delhi at the hands of Sachin Tendulkar in October 2007. It was the seed of the colour production press in India. Today, the Rs 2000-cr Japanese firm has 157 Imagepress colour installations in India. This according to Alex Kato, the general manager, OIOP production system, Canon in Tokyo says makes India the number eight country in the world terms of an installed base of C6000 and C7000. He said, "With the C800 and C700, India could easily become number five in the world ranking in a year."
 

Of the two new devices, the ImagePress C800 was inaugurated in the evening by Kazutada Kobayashi, president and CEO of Canon India and Dr Alok Bharadwaj, executive vice president, Canon India. This device which operates at 80ppm has a duty cycle of 500,000 pages. Meanwhile the C700 runs at 70ppm and has a duty cycle of 400,000 pages.

Canon offered special prices for its customers in the range of half a crore rupees for the new devices. Interestingly, Datta offered two price schemes for customers. These are: 4 to 10% price reduction on existing TG price. Plus the first 50 customers who install either of the two devices would get Rs 5 lakh worth of free prints.

The Canon C800 according to Datta has "an improved toner. Plus it can fuse at a low temperature due to an elastic intermediate transfer belt with additional elastic layer." In addition, the C800 series has a number of brand new features to the imagePress range, including Canon's new Consistently Vivid (CV) toner, which has been adapted and improved from the Vivid toner on the C7011, and new automated registration and colour calibration tools.
 

Datta added, "That digital print with electrophotography has challenges in terms of colour consistency and registration." And therefore the Consistently Vivid (CV) toner - has decreased the fusing temperature of the toner, and let the device achieve high colour consistency. This is because the engine is applying less heat so it has less effect on the paper.

During his bilingual presentation Datta also spoke about the new 32 beam Vertical Cavity Surface Emitting Laser (VCSEL), which delivers 2,400dpi resolution. This Datta said enabled manual correction of any small image deformations (upto 3 point size).

Later while examining the samples generated on the C800, the Canon team shared details about the colour calibration technique. This is enabled through the new Auto Correct Colour Tone tool for multidimensional mixed colour calibration, and the upgraded Auto Gradation Adjustment tool.

According to a Canon team member, "The two new devices can print on a wide variety of media, including uneven media such as textured or recycled substrates, from 52-300gsm (or up to 220gsm without any speed reduction)."