Inca Digital Brand Guidelines: The Cambridge Consultants Spin-Off Behind the Onset Flatbed

An engineering spin-off on the east side of Cambridge.

Inca Digital Printers was formed in 2000 as a spin-off from Cambridge Consultants, the product and technology development firm. A company announcement published by World of Print in September 2012 says it was founded by Bill Baxter and a small team from Cambridge Consultants, and a 2015 profile by the Cambridge Network gives the same year; the Australian trade magazine Print21, writing in 2022, described the business as operating since 1998, so the two dates sit side by side.

What Inca makes is industrial equipment, not printed goods. In the 2015 profile its chief operating officer described the machines as big flatbed digital printers, with a print area of about 1.6 by 3.22 metres and a bed that moves underneath a large carriage of printheads. The company’s pitch, as its business development manager put it in the same article, was that flatbed inkjet could take over work that had been done by screen printing, where every new design needs a new screen. The Cambridge Network profile also stressed the company’s local roots, saying it had built its business on local people and local expertise, in a city where, its business development manager said, industrial inkjet printing began.

Ownership changed early. In 2005 Inca was acquired by the Japanese group Dainippon Screen Mfg. Co., later Screen Holdings, the 2012 announcement says. That year the Lord-Lieutenant of Cambridgeshire presented the company with two Queen’s Awards for Enterprise, according to the same release. Screen remained the parent for seventeen years: in October 2014 its vice chairman opened an expanded training and validation centre at the Cambridge headquarters, the Cambridge Network reported. The centre was to check Inca’s main product lines before dispatch, train customers and distributors, and test new substrates, and it joined Screen’s WHITE CANVAS network of customer centres in Japan under the name WHITE CANVAS INCA.

Onset, Spyder and a distributor’s name on the machine.

Inca’s name is tied to two ranges of UV flatbed inkjet printers, the Onset and the Spyder, which the company described in 2012 as used worldwide to produce large-format display graphics. World of Print’s 2011 headlines also mention the Inca Eagle, used for furniture printing, and the Onset S20 and S40.

For much of its life the Onset reached customers under another company’s banner. In 2014 the Cambridge Network reported that the Onset printers were sold exclusively and globally by Fujifilm, while the Truepress Jet W3200UV series, also validated in Cambridge before dispatch, was sold through Screen. Print21 added in 2022 that Fujifilm also manufactured the ink for the range, and that the Onset M B1 sheet-fed printer was sold by Fujifilm as the Acuity B1.

The work itself has been varied. In the 2015 profile Inca staff described customers printing on real pizza dough for a marketing campaign, on flip-flops, and on snowboards and skis, alongside display graphics.

Manufacturing has stayed in Cambridge. In September 2012 the company opened a new manufacturing facility and head office in the city, bringing production under one roof in 5,869 square metres; the release said Inca wanted to keep its links with Cambridge University and the city’s inkjet groups, and that the new building added larger support, training, clean-room and stores space. The same release said the company aimed to bring a new product to market every 18 to 24 months, and quoted Baxter saying many customers were buying second and third machines as they moved away from traditional screen printing. In 2015 its business development manager said Inca had machines made in Cambridge in more than 35 countries.

Design and documentation.

Wide-format printer and cutting-table makers sell machines that are easiest to understand in motion. Their brochures and stands show flatbed printers with a gantry of printheads passing over rigid boards, roll-to-roll machines feeding out lengths of printed vinyl and textile, and cutting tables whose heads trace shapes in corrugated board. The finished work — a shop-window graphic, a printed box, a length of fabric — usually carries the customer’s brand rather than the maker’s.

Many of these companies arrived from somewhere else. EFI began with the Fiery colour server, which turned office copiers into colour printers, and moved into inkjet when it bought VUTEk in 2005; Durst made photographic enlargers in Brixen for decades before turning to UV inkjet in the early 2000s, according to Wikipedia and the companies’ own histories. Their names, in other words, were built on one kind of machine and carried onto another.

Because the machines are large, makers invite buyers to see them running. EFI names customer experience centres in Londonderry, New Hampshire, in Castellón, Spain, and in Bergamo, Italy; Durst opened a customer experience centre of more than 5,700 square metres at its new Brixen headquarters in 2019, the German trade magazine Druckmarkt reported, saying it wanted customers to come there rather than rely only on trade fairs.

The fairs still set the calendar. The FESPA fair is where Durst added two P5 printers in 2019 and planned to show its Kyveris software in 2026, according to Druckmarkt and Large Format Review; at drupa 2016 in Düsseldorf, Druckmarkt noted, Koenig & Bauer and Xerox announced a digital folding-carton press. This guide sets out what can be checked about each maker — who founded it, who owns it and what it makes — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

From Screen to Agfa.

In April 2022 the Belgian group Agfa-Gevaert announced that it would buy Inca Digital Printers from Screen. Print21 reported on 22 April 2022 that the deal also took in the print engine Screen had been developing with BHS Corrugated for an in-line corrugated board press, and that the Inca range then comprised the Onset X, the Onset X HS series with optional robotic automation, and the Spyder X.

Agfa closed the purchase in early June 2022, Indian Printer & Publisher reported on 3 June 2022. According to that report, the business Agfa took over included Inca’s high-speed multi-pass printers, its service organisation, a newly designed line of single-pass printers for packaging, and the joint corrugated print engine. Agfa’s chief executive, Pascal Juéry, called it a major step in the group’s transformation. Print21 noted that the purchase took Agfa back into high-end industrial inkjet, where it had earlier sold the Dotrix and M-Press Tiger presses, and that Fujifilm was by then moving away from technology partnerships to develop full systems of its own. Juéry said Agfa could now start integrating Inca’s activities into its own organisation, and Agfa’s digital print division presented the purchase as strengthening its position in sign and display and industrial printing.

For a design guide, Inca Digital shows how an engineering brand can be known through its machines while other companies’ names sit on the sales materials. Compare Agfa, its owner since 2022, and Mimaki, another maker of wide-format inkjet printers. For this guide we use indigo, a cool grey and a cyan with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Inca Digital’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.