After installing more than 1200 UVgel Colorado roll-to-roll large format printers last year, Canon has opened a new central ink production facility for UVgel ink in Venlo, The Netherlands.
Canon says that production volumes of UVgel ink for its roll-to-roll Colorado printer family have doubled over the past 12 months and to support this increasing customer base, along with its growing roll-to-roll print volumes, the company has ramped up its UVgel ink production capacity.
‘Our customers are printing more and more with their Colorado devices, with average volumes worldwide already exceeding 15,000sqm per year,’ said Canon’s vice president of large format graphics, Dirk Brouns. ‘We expect to see these volumes continue to grow. Some of our top-performing customers are even surpassing annual production volumes of 100,000sqm. With our new ink factory, we can continue to supply our customers and partners with high-quality UVgel inks and support growing print volumes in the field, both today and in the future.’
Canon considers the new facility, which has been fully operational since December 2019, to be indicative of its ‘its continued commitment and growth ambitions in the large format graphics roll-to-roll market.’
‘We’ve been able to double our ink production in less than a year and our operations team is eager to continue to help our customers confidently print growing volumes of large format roll-to-roll graphics,’ said Rob Puts, Canon Production Printing’s vice president of manufacturing and logistics. ‘At the same time, our new facility has been designed to be as environmentally friendly as possible. With a focus on operational efficiencies, the facility is delivering increased energy savings by reusing cooling capacity from other production plants on our campus and using a heat exchange unit to warm the cool air coming into the building with the heat of the air leaving the production hall.’
