Recently we visited the InPrint show, held in Munich, Germany, which aims to deal with industrial printing. Its not easy to define industrial printing, though it basically means using print – mainly inkjet – as part of a manufacturing process rather than as a goal in itself. In a way there’s nothing new in this, since we’ve already seen inkjet printing used in several industrial applications, from garments to ceramics. Nessan Cleary reports.
At first glance it seems that industrial printing should be different from the sort of graphic arts printing that we normally cover. But essentially it’s just a matter of squirting ink at a substrate, though often with a different approach to building the print system. Whereas in graphic arts we’re mainly looking at the complete printing systems, with industrial printing the starting point is more likely to be the individual components, particularly the inks and the printheads, with all the vendors keen to stress their willingness to work with other suppliers.
Thus Jon Harper Smith, marketing manager for Fujifilm Europe, says, “As soon as we start looking at any kind of industrial process then the starting point has to be the ink. These machines are all about the ink because it’s the only thing that ends up on the product that the consumer actually touches. So that’s dictated by the process and the application.” But he adds, “We should also look at the two together. The starting point should be what is the system to do, what does the ink have to do in the system and how to create the print engine to get that chemistry so it needs to be a much more integrated approach.”
Advantages of digital
Industrial manufacturing normally implies long production runs so it may seem counter-intuitive that people would turn to inkjet, which is most suitable for short-runs. But Graham Kennedy, business development manager for Ricoh’s inkjet division, says, “The market has become quite mature. More and more we hear about the integration of inkjet technology into manufacturing process and that’s where we can have a lot of value. We understand that if print is to be integrated then customers don’t necessarily want to change their processes.”
However, he says that manufacturers will only turn to inkjet if it adds value to their business in some way. He explains, “You might not get higher quality so you need another reason. It could be eliminating a process out of your manufacturing line. Or it could get you late stage personalization so you could sell more of that product or at a higher price.” He adds, “There’s a trade-off so there has to be a reason for integrating inkjet and more often than not it will be adding value to the top line.”
It’s much harder to define what that value might be. Most vendors start off by mentioning the ability to do personalization, but few are really serious about this. Rather, most companies are looking at short-runs or versioning. Digital printing is also good for just-in-time manufacturing, removing the cost of having to store products, which offsets the additional cost of digital printing.
Andreas Unterweger, managing director of Durst’s Industrial Inkjet Application division, says, “Our customers are asking for a higher variety of products and consequently they decide to step into digital inkjet printing and can reduce costs, compared to conventional print technology, like storing of semifinished products and of things like screens. And the reaction time is very important.”
He continues, “We have customers producing cork flooring and ceiling panels. These are all wood-based and they are stepping into digital because of the high variety of printed images and the development is much faster with a digital inkjet printer.” He adds, “The volume is the same but the number of jobs is changing.”
Who’s doing industrial printing?
The InPrint show attracted a diverse range of people from different industries. Paul Adriaensen, marketing manager for Agfa Graphics, says, “We are seeing integrators, people that make production lines for the clothing and manufacturing industries, for bottling lines, manufacturing of all sorts of white goods. The integrators who make these lines see the need to integrate print. We also see brand owners who are looking at what is possible before they go to their production line integrators.”
These people have different approaches, as Harper Smith explains, “We are targeting three potential groups of customers. There are wide format graphics who might be looking to branch out their existing business proposition with an inkjet or a repurposing of their manufacturing. At the other end of the spectrum there are manufacturers, people who might be putting inkjet into a manufacturing process somehow. The third group is integrating people who might have a solution for, say, wide format graphics and are looking to engage more in industrial and packaging markets.”
Generic machines
Although much of the industrial print market is about bespoke integrations, several companies also showed generic industrial printers, mainly designed to be slotted into an existing manufacturing line. Thus Durst has developed several industrial textile printers, as well as glass and ceramic printers plus a series of Rho IP printers, including the IP 507 that was on the stand. It’s mainly designed for printing things like membrane keyboards and small parts. It can be configured with up to eight colors, and has a table size of 500 x 700 mm.
Bergstein demonstrated its Digi 5 digital printer, which is used to print a variety of products from brake pads to personalized saws. It has a modular construction that can be tailored to each customer and a conveyor belt to pass products from a production line through the printer and back to the line. It uses up to three Xaar 1002 printheads to print a swathe from 70 to 210 mm. CEO Peter Bergstein says that he is also testing Samba heads as it’s easier to stitch them together for wider widths.
Heidelberg used its Jetmaster Dimension to print personalized footballs throughout the show. It also uses Xaar 1002 printheads and prints CMYK plus an opaque white or a protective coating. It only prints a narrow swathe but will take objects with a diameter from ten to 300mm, showing off a range of items such as drinks bottles as well as the footballs. Heidelberg has said that it is developing a larger version that will be shown at drupa next year.
Software
Another area to consider is all those annoying side issues that keep printers on their toes like color management. As Adriaensen points out, “There are more questions like, how do we get the file in, do we use Asanti cloud technology? That means that this company has to have someone who is going to be responsible for this and that’s one of the challenges in this technology.”
For the industrial sector these things are still an afterthought. Bergstein, for example, says, “We use the Onyx RIP software for color management. We tend not to do that much in color management. Our customers are not that picky,” adding “It’s a different type of industry from the sign industry.” Then again there was a time when the sign industry was exactly like that and so it’s likely that these issues will become more important to this sector.
Nonetheless, several wide format RIP vendors were at the show. Caldera’s European sales manager Eric Mendiharat commented, “If people have a printer they are looking for software. As long as it’s inkjet digital then we can propose a solution.” He says that Caldera can cover a range of different sectors from textiles and ceramics to more exotic materials like concrete.
Colorgate demonstrated its RIP but has also developed a number of hardware solutions. This included the Rapid Spectro Cube, essentially a box in a flight case for measuring the colors of objects and creating ICC profiles. There’s also the Colorrizer, specifically designed for measuring the color of objects such as textiles and ceramic tiles that takes into account the color space of a particular printing system. Colorgate has also developed a modular system for testing combinations of printhead and ink, called the PrintProcess Lab.
In conclusion, industrial printing can really be seen as just a natural extension of graphic arts printing, which already now includes textiles and ceramics as well as a wide range of large format applications. Much of this technology will feed back into the graphic arts, particularly through packaging, with new ink technologies that work with plastics and flexible films. We suspect that we’ll see a lot more crossover between those applications that obviously belong to the printing industry and newer uses, such as manufacturing. So, perhaps industrial printing is not so alien after all . . .
