I came across Memjet at last week’s Japan Inkjet Technology Fair in Tokyo, which gave me a chance to talk with Kazumi Honda, regional VP of Memjet in Japan, for an update on the company.
The original Memjet printhead was developed as a single-pass head long before other head manufacturers started looking at single-pass printing. But it’s only really with the development of the single-channel DuraLink and, in particular, the four-channel DuraFlex heads that it’s really come into its own. That’s partly to do with improvements in the performance of the heads, and partly because there’s a recognition that water-based inks can be more suitable from environmental and health and safety viewpoints for some applications.
At the JITF event, Honda showed off samples that broadly cover many of the applications where water-based inks play a role, including transactional, corrugated and carton board packaging as well as labels.
The Memjet heads do offer a reasonably high 1600 dpi resolution with a tiny 2.1 pL binary drop size, running at up to 15 m/sec. The primary advantage to an OEM of using Memjet heads lies in the ability to build a system and get it to market fairly quickly. Honda adds: “The benefit is the simplicity and reliability of the whole system.”
The Memjet heads all use a thermal inkjet design, where the heads have a very short lifespan and are normally seen as a consumable item. However, Memjet has continued to extend the lifetime of its heads, which are currently said to be good for up to 8 billion droplets. The plan is to take this to 10 billion droplets next year and up to 15 billion by 2030, at which point Honda questions if we can still regard these heads as disposable items.
He says that this longer lifespan is down to a program of continuous improvements in materials and production processes, adding, “In general there are several other approaches like structural improvements and improvements in the ink.” This includes things like adding a new CMOS that controls the jetting timing to reduce edge artifacts.
This affects the DuraBolt and DuraCore systems as well as the DuraFlex printheads, which all use the same chips as the basis of the heads. The DuraCore heads are largely an evolution of the DuraFlex heads but only available as part of a print engine that consists of the heads, controller and ink system. The DuraCore heads have four channels, meaning that OEMs can choose to use a single head with CMYK, or two heads with two colors each at double the speed or four heads for the fastest solution. Honda says that the DuraCore has become the more popular option in recent years because it gives an OEM a bit more freedom to differentiate their solution.
The DuraBolt, on the other, hand is a turnkey solution that includes a DFE, supplied by Xitron. It’s made up
of two printheads, each configured for two channels to give faster speeds with a total of four colors. There’s also a DuraBolt printbar that allows an OEM to put together a wider print array by stitching multiple DuraBolt modules together.
However, the main disadvantage is that Memjet expects that its OEMs will use the ink it supplies. That does limit the ability of an OEM to fully develop their own system or to maximize their profits on that system. Honda points out: “We can offer them a very strategic price if they use a large volume.”
Memjet itself has a global footprint. The main management team is based in California, USA, but the main R&D base is in Sydney, Australia, where the Memjet heads were originally developed. However, the global headquarters and some R&D is located in Dublin, Ireland, with some production in Taiwan, and manufacturing partners in China and Malaysia as well as Memjet’s supplier operations in Singapore. You can find further details from memjet.com.
