Commercial printing, where traditional offset still reigns, could be transformed with the introduction of a bevy of versatile, high-speed digital presses. One of the most talked-about models being unveiled Thursday at Drupa 2008 - a showcase for the graphic communications industry held every four years in Dusseldorf, Germany - is Stream, a continuous-feed inkjet color press from Eastman Kodak Co. p> It can print more than 2,500 pages - or 500 feet - of customized catalogs, brochures, books, magazines, credit-card bills or direct mail each minute. And it may be able to narrow cost, quality and speed gaps that have kept digital printers from capturing more than 10 percent of the world's high-end commercial market. Current full-color digital presses - Xerox Corp. s iGen, Hewlett-Packard Co.'s Indigo and Kodak's NexPress - top out around 120 pages a minute at a cost of 5 cents to 6 cents per page, analysts say. Output from the Stream is closer to analog-world prices of a penny or less per page, a dramatic improvement that makes the newer technology much more competitive.

"It's a step-function improvement in speed and cost," said Citigroup analyst Matthew Troy. "And it gives the printer the ability to do variable data printing at a quality level that is close to traditional offset. And that is massive."

Photography icon Kodak expects to bring Stream to market in early 2009.

Seeing its film and photofinishing businesses nose-dive, Kodak has tapped its inkjet expertise and splurged $2.6 billion on a string of acquisitions since 2004 in hopes of grabbing a stake in a fertile market where Hewlett-Packard, Ricoh, Xerox, and Fuji also are doing fierce battle.

Over the next two weeks at Drupa 2008 - which could draw more than 400,000 people - the industry's major players will put their latest commercial printing wares on display and introduce "the first generation of digital technology that really has a shot at displacing that old analog-based infrastructure," Troy said.

"If the trend in this industry for the last three years was about getting people to print in color, the trend for the next decade is going to be digital high-speed production using either inkjet or toner-based technologies."

With profits from offset lithography printing stagnant - and more than 3 percent of the nation's more than 30,000 commercial printers folding each year - a radical shift to digital now looks imminent, said Steve Nigro, general manager of HP's graphics and imaging business.

"The advantage of digital is it allows a whole new set of prints that you cannot do cost-effectively with analog: photo specialty albums or on-demand books, personalized magazines and maybe personalized newspapers in the future, targeted brochures, catalogs that are built based on who you are and what you're interested in," Nigro said.

Kodak's success will hinge on how well it prevails against more entrenched competitors such as Xerox, its historic cross-town rival, and Palo Alto, Calif.-based HP, which is unveiling this week a four-color Inkjet Web Press that prints more than 400 feet a minute.

Other companies with new commercial-scale digital printers at Drupa include Oce NV of the Netherlands, Agfa, and Ricoh/IBM. And Xerox is introducing a new ink gel that's intended to make its commercial printers' colors brighter, last longer and adhere to surfaces such as foil and plastic.

"There will be all varieties of inkjet and other digital technologies brought to market for the first time," said Bill Lamparter of PrintCom Consulting Group in Waxhaw, N.C. "We've seen most of them but certainly not all of them. We think Kodak stands out in the crowd."

After slogging through a four-year digital makeover, Kodak is banking on replacing the high profit margins it once made from film with ink revenue from new lines of printers for both consumer photography and commercial printing.

"The main attribute of digital at the highest level is the flexibility because you can customize each pixel and each page," said Kevin Joyce, chief marketing officer at Kodak's graphic communications group. "That is the game changer."

"You can imagine a day," echoed Troy of Citigroup, "when page 6 of The Economist magazine will have an advertisement that's focused on Matt Troy. All of a sudden, that advertisement speaks directly to me."

The biggest limitation has been speed because the fastest offset printers can produce about 3,000 feet of pages a minute, but "you cannot do anything but fixed-image static printing," Lamparter said.

"With inkjet or toner digital processes, I can personalize it, I can specialize it," he said. "It's an entire system, and it starts with your data-gathering, how you handle and analyze the data and structure printed materials based on that data. It is a very big deal. What it does is it enables printers to send a marketing message tailored to you."

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AP Business Writer Stephen Singer in Hartford, Conn., contributed to this story.