The Landa presses feature a giant touchscreen on the side, which shows the status of the press and doubles as the operator console.

Last year there was a lot of new technology at drupa. What is happening to these prototypes and where will the next big thing come from? Nessan Cleary reports.

Most print companies routinely invest eye-watering sums on new equipment to stay competitive or to branch out into new areas. Most technology advances are incremental, with newer models offering greater productivity or lower costs. But every so often something genuinely new comes along, something that could turn the industry on its head. The trick, of course, is to spot these advances and to understand their relevance in a bid to stay ahead of the curve.

The holy grail has always been to have the personalisation that digital print offers, with the high productivity and low costs of offset printing. For now, inkjet in one form or another appears to be the best approach.

Most current commercial inkjet presses use water-based inks to deliver both low cost and high speed. But these inks give best results with inkjet-optimised papers, and there is a limited choice of such papers, which tend to be expensive. Consequently the paper mills are putting in a lot of R&D to develop suitable papers, while the print vendors are tinkering with the printhead electronics to better control just how much water is put on the paper.

Another approach is to use UV-curable ink, which can adhere to a wide range of substrates and cures immediately so that there is no delay in post-processing the printed products. However, there are some disadvantages in UV ink, in that they have high viscosity, making them hard to jet at high speed, and they cure on the surface of the media giving them a much higher pile height than with offset inks. Also, these inks tend to be more expensive than waterbased inks.

Some vendors have experimented with hybrid inks to get around these issues. Fujifilm, for example, has demonstrated the Jetpress F, aimed at the packaging market, which uses water-based UV inks.

Jon Harper-Smith, marketing manager for Fujifilm Europe, said: ‘The advantage is that you get a degree of viscosity control from a component that evaporates, which gives you a tremendous benefit in that it allows the rest of the ink to have higher performance.’

This could mean giving better adherence to a wide range of substrates but could also mean a lower height to the cured ink, since part of the ink has evaporated away, giving a better visual appearance.

Konica Minolta has also been working on UV inkjet, having shown a B2 inkjet press, the KM1, at the last drupa show. As a result of the feedback from drupa, the press can now handle slightly thicker substrates, up from 0.45 mm to 0.6 mm, to suit the demands of the folding carton market. The use of UV inks means that it will print to a wide range of substrates, including coated and uncoated as well as tracing paper and metalised film.

Konica Minolta sees packaging and high value applications such as photo books as its main target, which is not unrealistic given its high 1200 dpi resolution. However, the speed still appears to be around 1650 duplex sheets per hour. It is likely to be available towards the end of next year, or early 2015.

 

Liquid toner

The main alternative to inkjet is liquid toner, which promises similar speeds to the aqueous inkjet presses, with the quality that the UV inkjet presses are aiming for. HP Indigo has been the main proponent of liquid toner, introducing its Indigo 10000 B2 commercial press earlier this year. HP also has two more B2 Indigo models, the 20000, a 74 cm web-fed press aimed at the film converting market, and the 30000, which prints to boards and cartons up to 750 x 530 mm.

Xeikon has further developed the monochrome Trillium press that it showed at drupa and now has a four colour version running. This is a duplex press with a 500 mm print width. Danny Mertens, director of marketing and business development for Xeikon’s document printing division, said that Xeikon expects to install the first beta machines within a few months and anticipates a six month test period. Currently, Xeikon is planning to launch the first Trilliumbased press by Spring of next year. This will run at 60 metres per minute but Xeikon is planning to develop a new imaging head, which should double that for future versions.

The key to this press is its high density toner that features tiny two-micron sized particles leading to 1200 dpi resolution. The press has very tight tolerances, with the gap between the various transfer cylinders being just five microns, a major factor in keeping the toner particles in place, leading to a sharper image. Initially this will be aimed at the direct mail market.

Meanwhile, Canon has been quietly beta testing its InfiniStream press. It is a continuous feed B1 simplex press with a 711 mm wide web. It can produce 120 metres per minute or around 7200 B1 or 14,400 B2 sheets per hour. It is a modular system with up to seven colours. The imaging system itself is based on offset, with an imaging cylinder and rubber coated blanket cylinder. There is a separate print tower for each colour and each print tower includes an LED bar that writes a latent image to the imaging cylinder, plus an inking system that adds the liquid toner to that cylinder. The image is then transferred first to a blanket cylinder and then to the substrate so that all the colours  come together directly on the substrate before fixing.

The press uses a wet on wet system, though Roland Stasiczek, director of marketing for the InfiniStream technology, says that Canon is using an electrostatic charge after each colour is laid down to fix the toner for a very short timeframe on the paper. This ensures that the colours do not run into each other before the main drying stage. It is aimed at the folding carton market where Canon believes the image quality will be its main selling point. Canon is expecting to install up to another five beta machines later this year and in the early part of 2014, with a commercial launch likely to happen by the end of next year or early 2015, subject to the beta test results.

 

Nanography

Yet another approach is Landa’s Nanographic printing, shown at last year’s drupa and still being developed. It uses a water-based ink with tiny nano-sized particles of pigment that are said to be very efficient at absorbing light, giving them a very wide colour gamut. The ink is jetted to a moving blanket, which is heated so that most of the water evaporates from the ink, effectively transforming it to a hot melt adhesive with coloured pigments.

The surface of the transfer belt acts like an adhesive backing so that the ink easily transfers to the paper. When it lands on the relatively cold paper, the sudden change in temperature helps it to bond firmly to the substrate.

It sits on top of the paper, rather than penetrating into the fibres, but thanks to the nano pigments it forms a very thin layer on the paper surface, just 500 nanometers thick, said to be roughly half the thickness of an offset image. The ink forms a very sharply defined dot, with no gain, and will print to many different substrates, including plastic and film.

Since drupa, Landa has upgraded the printheads, which means higher native resolution of 1200 x 600 dpi. The first sales are likely to be toward the end of 2014, by which time Landa expects to match offset quality, with a further improvement to quality by drupa 2016.

Gerry Mulvaney, Landa’s European salesman, says that the company is concentrating on getting the B1 format press to market first because that is where the main interest has been, adding: ‘The intention is that we will be starting with some beta sites with the S10 folding carton machine for the packaging market which is the first press to be tested in 2014.’ This should run at 13,000 sheets per hour, single or double-sided on any substrate up to 400 gsm, easily enough to be a serious alternative to a litho press, if Landa can make good on its promise to match litho print quality with similar costs.

In conclusion, it looks as if the next two years are going to be really interesting as all these technologies start to become commercially available. But although the technologies themselves appear to be viable, given the samples that have already been shown, the big question will be the cost, both of the presses and of the inks, which none of the vendors particularly want to talk about now.