There was plenty of heavy metal at the show in the form of new offset and flexo presses but the main draw at drupa were the various digital offerings that are now improved in resolution and speed. The major shift is in the improvement of inkjet based systems for both sheet and web fed systems many of which now have a significant footprint in the market.
There is a general push in the entire industry towards packaging and there is considerable innovation in toner, liquid toner and inkjet aimed at solid board and corrugated cartons and flexible packaging and labels. Nessan Cleary, Krishanu Dutta and Naresh Khanna report.Â
There’s no question that the show belonged to Benny Landa, with the Landa Nanographic presses dominating all the conversations about digital printing. It’s clear that all the vendors regard this as the technology to beat, even though Landa is now several years behind his original schedule with the first printers still not due for commercial release until next year.
Nonetheless, Landa did talk about four B1 presses, all with up to 1200 dpi resolution and with up to eight colors – CMYK, plus orange, blue and green for extended color gamut inks and with room for one additional ink. The S10 is a single-sided sheetfed press, mainly for carton packaging, that produces 6,500 sheets an hour, or up to 13,000 sheets an hour. with an optional high speed kit. There’s an S10P, essentially the same model but with a perfector for the commercial print and publication market, with half the speed.
There’s also a web-fed B1 press, the W10, which is aimed at the flexible packaging market and runs at 100 metres per minute. Landa also announced another model, the W10P, which was not shown. This is a web-fed press with two engines that can print 200 metres per minute. Landa claims that this ‘is up to 24 times faster than any other commercial quality digital press’ though it’s worth noting that this is the standard speed of Kodak’s Prosper presses, and that the Prosper printheads can be pushed to 300 metres per minute, albeit at a lower resolution. Some of HP’s T-series web presses can also run over 200 metres per minute.
Part of what sets the Landa presses apart is their use of an offset approach, printing to a belt that then transfers the image to the substrate. However, we believe that several other vendors are also working on a similar approach.
Canon
Canon, for example, showed off a prototype inkjet press, the Voyager, a B2+ photo printer. This uses Pagewide BubbleJet printheads and prints to a revolving drum, with the image subsequently transferred to the substrate. It’s a 7-color duplex printer that Canon believes will be suitable for catalogs, brochures and marketing materials, particularly in the food and travel sectors that tend to make greater use of color photography.
Heidelberg
Heidelberg, which had initially considered the Landa technology, has instead opted to develop a B1 digital press that marries its considerable knowledge of press systems with a Fujifilm inkjet system. The Primefire 106 owes much to the narrow web Gallus Labelfire 340 press that was launched last year. Thus the new press also uses Fujifilm Samba printheads with a 7-color inkset CMYK plus orange, green and violet, though the Primefire uses aqueous inks rather than UV-curable, and is said to be safe for food packaging.
It’s a sheetfed machine taking 70 x 100 mm sheets. It can produce 2,500 sph with 1200 x 1200 dpi resolution, with the samples shown at drupa looking very good indeed. The inks are from Fujifilm and use its Rapic technology for controlling dot gain on untreated surfaces including flexible films.
HP and KodakÂ
However, the main competition to Landa for now is still probably HP, and maybe Kodak. HP has continued to iterate its PageWide Inkjet web presses, announcing a new model for the show. The T490 is a 1.06 metre wide press, available in color or monochrome, and fitted with the new High Definition Nozzle Architecture or HDNA thermal printheads. These heads have double the resolution from 10,560 to 21,120 nozzles and offer dual drop weights, essentially two drop sizes for better image quality. The T490 can print at up to 305 metres per minute in its standard mode or 152 metres a minute with the dual drop weight in a higher quality mode.
Kodak has further developed its Stream continuous inkjet technology with a new iteration, called Ultrastream. Essentially, Kodak has opted for higher image quality, pushing the resolution up from 600 x 900 dpi to 600 x 1800 dpi, but with the speed dropping down to 150 metres per minute. The print samples appeared extremely good, albeit under glass, which Kodak says is down to using smaller ink drop sizes together with improved accuracy in where those drops are placed. It was demonstrated on a 20 cm wide label press and isn’t due to be released as a commercial product until next year. The main market is clearly packaging and direct mail, with Kodak also talking about magazines and catalogs.
Konica MinoltaÂ
Konica Minolta officially launched its KM-1 B2 press, which we’ve already covered in some depth in previous articles including Naresh Khanna’s reports on its live demonstration at IGAS in Tokyo in 2015. However, Konica Minolta has rebranded its commercial inkjet under the Accurio name, so the KM-1 will now become the AccurioJet KM-1.
Konica Minolta also showed a B1 inkjet press aimed at the packaging market. The KM-C is a flatbed press that’s designed for folding carton and thin corrugated applications.It takes sheets with thickness of 0.3 – 1.2 mm. Its print engine islargely based on the KM-1 so it uses Konica Minolta print heads with 1200 x 1200 dpi resolution coupled with UV-curable inks.It has 4- colors, but with space for two more to be added in the future.It can produce up to 2200 sph. For now it’sjust a technology demonstration but it seemed to get a good reception and the results were very similar to the KM-1.Â
Xerox
Xerox appears to have made the most of its acquisition of Impika, showing a strong line up of drop on demand inkjet printers. This included two new production printers. The Brenva HD is a cut-sheet printer for which Xerox has essentially married up inkjet printing with the iGen paper transport. It’s aimed at the gap between high-end toner and low-end inkjet presses. It includes an in-line spectrophotometer for color management but can also be run in monochrome mode.
The second press, the Trivo 2400, is a continuous feed printer. It can produce 168 metres per minute in color or 200 metres per minute in monochrome. It comes with an EFI Fiery-based print server and is aimed at the market for catalogs, magazines and color books. Xerox sold several of these during the show, including two to French company DocOne, which also bought a Rialto 900.
Xerox also showed off a press that it’s developing with KBA for the folding carton market. The VariJet 106 is based on a KBA B1 Rapida 106 press and will have the option to add in-line units for things like coating, cold foil application and rotary diecutting. It will be able to print 4,500 B1 sheets an hour. It should be ready for release next year.
Screen
Screen has updated its Truepress Jet 520 range with a new 520NX inkjet printer. It uses the latest generation of Epson’s PrecisionCore printhead. This new head is a 5-inch module with a maximum resolution of 600 by 1,200 dpi plus advanced ink volume control. It’s a four color machine but there’s now room for a fifth unit for spot colors or special inks such as MICR.
It’s worth noting that Screen has about a thousand of its 520 printers installed worldwide. This makes it the most successful of all the commercial high speed inkjet printers around.
Screen has also developed new inks for its Truepress Jet 520HD webfed press that enable it to print to standard offset coated paper. This is a significant development, given that the 520HD is a fairly cost-effective inkjet press for its speed and overall image quality and the ability to use standard papers will help lower the running cost further. The new inks won’t be available until next January.
Liquid tonerÂ
So far we’ve only covered inkjet but it’s worth remembering that there are other digital technologies and that liquid toner in particular is a strong competitor. Toner has always been good at handling a range of different substrates and suspending the toner particles in a liquid carrier allows for much smaller particles – down to less than two microns – which gives extremely good resolution. The result is image quality that’s good enough for many high-end applications from direct mail to photobooks, at a speed that can compete against many of the inkjet presses.
Xeikon
Thus Xeikon gave us an update on the Trillium One, the liquid toner press that it showed behind glass at the last drupa. This year it was shown running on the stand and is expected to be commercially available from Q2 next year. It’s a 4-color machine, capable of running at 60 metres per minute with a resolution of 1200 dpi. But the real story is the image quality that it can achieve, with the samples showing excellent quality and deep colors. Much of this is down to the Tonnik liquid toner, which ticks all the environmental boxes, with the images being fully de-inkable and the carrier liquid being recyclable.
Xeikon launched its latest dry toner printer, the 9600, which has now replaced the 8600. Essentially it’s an upgraded version that’s able to handle a wider range of substrates, from 40 to 350 gsm, thanks to its use of Xeikon’s QA-CD toner. As with all the Xeikon document printers, it’s a web-fed 4- color duplex machine with an option for a fifth spot color. It can print 14.5 metres per minute with a resolution of 1200 dpi. It can also be field-upgraded to the top of the range 9800.
Miyakoshi
Miyakoshi, which worked with Xeikon on developing the chassis for the Trillium One, itself showed off two new digital printers. The MPD4000 is a compact B2 sheetfed liquid toner printer. It’s a 4-color machine that’s capable of producing 4000 sheets an hour in simplex mode, half of that in duplex. It handles papers from 64 to 450 gsm with a maximum resolution of 1200 x 1200 dpi.
Miyakoshi also showed the MJP20W, which has been developed with Fujifilm. Thus it uses Fujifilm’s Eucon inkjet technology, which is based on LED-UV printing but uses nitrogen gas as part of its curing process. The result is that it can print to flexible films for packaging, including food packaging. It runs at 50 metres per minute with 600 dpi resolution. Indeed, there’s been a very clear trend toward the packaging sector, with several digital presses designed for specific sectors, such as corrugated and flexible packaging. But these are really stories in their own right.
