(L-R) John Mills, Ken Hanulec and Martijn van den Broek
On the afternoon of the first day at FESPA 2015, three experts from the wide format manufacturing community joined journalist Sophie Matthews Paul for a wide format technology panel debate. Edited excerpts follow.
Question: Where will wide format graphics go next?
Martijn van den Broek (Screen Europe): There will be a lot of innovations coming and new possibilities. It’s most important that we see the productivity going up so that people can produce jobs more efficiently. There are many systems that produce 20-30 square metres per hour. To be competitive they have to be faster.
John Mills (Inca Digital): The challenge for people walking around the show is it’s very difficult to tell the differences between the machines. The quality will all look great. Everyone has a brochure and the throughput on those is never what you get in reality. Customers think: how do they differ? We will see new ink from Durst and that’s going to be something that does differentiate.
Ken Hanulec (EFI): What I see from customers is people trying to lower cost and grow their business through innovation and different solutions. The value add comes in when you leverage in the inks, hardware/software and the capability of the manufacturer around that.
Question: Will there be growth in rigid production rather than roll-fed?
MB: People that are looking to print dedicated flatbed often run into limitations like accuracy or ability to print double sided; they want a dedicated flatbed but they also want to have flexibility for rolls.
JM: Inca will produce other types of machine to grow. We are seeing quite an interesting change as the pressure on analogue print is driving adoption of flatbed. But roll fed is probably six or seven times the size of flatbed.
KH: You have to ask what type of business you are in: Commercial print? Screen print? Then you have to look at the applications you want to produce. If a commercial printer wants to diversify, they will likely start with hybrid device and a print whole host of products. As they go up market to very specific applications, they go to a dedicated roll or board machine. You start with a hybrid and the second machine is normally dedicated roll or flatbed.
Question: As droplet sizes have got smaller, has drop quality driven people more to roll fed because they can use it for closer viewing applications?
JM: The thing about drop size is that if you want high throughput you want bigger drops. Below 10pl (picolitres), unless you are 40 cm away, your eye cannot resolve the difference. It very much depends on what you are trying to sell. You want to go as fast as you can for that quality.
KH: Drop size plays a big role in equipment selection. We have no performance hits on 7pl; it’s the same as 12pl. It’s really important that you have very fine imaging heads.
MB: You do see a drop in speed with 7pl. 14pl is a good balance between quality and throughput. What’s more important is drop control: where you put it on the media. When you have drop placement right you can also do lenticular.
KH: We spend a lot on R&D to understand the best price performance. We don’t see placement accuracy as an issue.
JM: Drop placement is absolutely key, and there are all sorts of difficulties getting them in the right place at four billion drops a second. The other thing is satellite drops – that’s what really determines your small text quality. There are so many factors that go into print quality. As you get finer and finer those external factors become more important than the drop size.
Question: Mercury Arc or LED curing?
JM: If we could find an LED that gives the same UV output as Mercury we would switch tomorrow. We need a lot of power to cure. For smaller machines it’s much easier to switch to LED.
MB: It’s something we are looking at. There’s not an LED strong enough to cure for us. For high speed inkjet to dry and get good adhesion we don’t see the LED technology being there at this moment.
KH: We introduced LED technology four years ago and we’ve got it on three different product lines. There are many benefits and I agree there are economic factors at play. We made a commitment to the market that we would propagate LED across all the products, and the remaining one we still have to do is the high speed product range.
