Simon Eccles looks at Atom, the first inkjet print head from Buskro that can be driven by third party mailing systems.
‘In the UK and Germany we’re still best known for our wax inkjet printers, which we haven’t actually made for some years,’ is the rueful comment of Michelle Sanz, inside sales co-ordinator at Canadian inkjet systems manufacturer Buskro.
Following the closure of its UK subsidiary a few years ago, Buskro felt that it was slipping down the market’s awareness, so it has been building up its presence again with the appointment of distributors. So far there are four: Addressing & Mailing Solutions (AMS), Inline Graphic Solutions, Promail, and most recently Secure Coding Solutions, announced in November.
Set up 35 years ago, Buskro is based in Ontario. The name comes from the two original founders, Messrs Busman and Kropman. The current president, Roy Kropman, is the son of the founder Henry, who has retired.
The company makes process colour single-pass inkjet systems, high-speed large array piezo and thermal inkjet printers and UV-cured inkjets, for a variety of markets including mailing, labels, cards, gaming and tickets. It builds the print units and their controllers inhouse, with just the printhead arrays being bought in. It also makes its own water, solvent and UV-cured inks.
The Elite wax systems sold particularly well to UK and German mailing houses, which appreciated their ability to print on almost anything, from polywraps through envelopes and directly onto magazine and catalogue covers. Although the Elite printers are described by Ms Sanz as ‘obsolete’, they were built to last so there are still a lot of them. They are still serviced and supported through local distributors such as Promail, while the 700 series controllers have been upgraded to keep them current.
Buskro is hoping that the new UK distributors will be able to achieve similar market success with its current inkjet products. These include the Atlas (solvent inks), Aurora (UV curable), Apollo (water based inks with HP thermal heads) and the new Atom piezo systems (choice of solvent or UV-cure inks). Buskro has also introduced its first full colour inkjet card line, called the Card Personalization Solution (CPS), shown to Europe at the Cartes exhibition in Paris during November.
Atom is a piezo drop-on-demand inkjet head system suited to both text and barcodes, available in two sizes: 65 mm swath with 300 dpi, or 25 mm, 256 dpi (the horizontal resolution can be between 100 and 600 dpi). Maximum speed is 4.6 metres per second. The unit is comparatively large, at 452 x 236 x 442 mm (LxWxH). This is partly due to the 375 ml ink bottle that plugs straight into the head, with a choice of solvent, quick-dry solvent or UV curing inks. There are serial and Ethernet ports for connection to third party data sources.
Chris Hart, systems specialist at AMS, said that the built-in ink bottle saves costs measurably. ‘Other systems have separate tanks and feeds, sometimes with long feed lines, so you have a lot of valuable ink in transit between the bottle and the print head. If you have to take them off for maintenance that ink is lost, and the cost will add up considerably. These inks will also print on a wide range of substrates.’
According to Ms Sanz, one of the reasons for choosing AMS was its existing distributorship of the popular Flexmail mailing software, developed by Flex Systems in Holland. ‘Atom is the first time we’ve ever brought out a product that can integrate with other people’s software as opposed to just our own,’ she said.
Kevin McPheat, managing director of AMS, said: ‘We’ve got it running with Flexmail drivers now, which is a big advantage to customers. It’s an easy migration path from a desktop printer or one of our medium range printers. Where they use Flexmail already they don’t need to redesign all of their envelope or substrate layouts to go to Buskro, it’s a very easy change.’
Atom, together with the other Buskro models, will be available through all the UK distributors. AMS included the range in its open days at Hoddesden in October, which marked the official launch of the Atom in the UK. ‘We have an Atom in our showroom and have done quite a few demonstrations, though we haven’t sold any yet. You need to have very high monthly volumes to justify the cost,’ Mr McPheat admits. ‘The ink cost is lower than the normal HP type inkjet, but it’s not that low, so it’s mainly attractive when you start getting into hundreds of thousands or millions per month. The £60,000 would buy several of the HP printers, but the running costs are lower.
