EFI has confirmed the commercial availability of the super high speed Nozomi 18000+ single-pass printer for display graphics, and named its first European customer, London-based Delta Group. The company has also announced the shipping of previously-announced DFE and workflow products, and previewed a new textile printer in the Reggiani range.
The Nozomi 18000+ LED is a 1.8m width single-pass printer designed for the sign and display graphics market, based on the technologies in the corrugated printer of the same name. EFI claims that at up to 1000 sheets or 1.2 x 1.4m boards per hour, equivalent to between 3000 and 5000sqm/hr, it is three to five times faster than scanning head alternatives and can handle both synthetic and paper-based media.
Announced in 2021, the 18000+ offers manual or fully automated feeding and stacking, a hybrid aqueous/UV primer for difficult materials and optional pre-white coating for reflective or coloured substrates and/or post UV coating for durability and weather protection. EFI contends that its ‘unparalleled throughput helps users drive profitability in a wide range of high-volume signage applications’.
That argument seems to have been taken on board at Delta Group, which has ordered the new press for delivery in the third quarter of 2022, making it the second customer site for the 18000+ and the first outside North America.
‘We have had remarkable success as an early adopter of EFI’s single-pass technology on our first Nozomi solution, an EFI Nozomi C18000 corrugated board printer that we use to produce high-quality displays,’ said Delta Group COO Martin Shipp. ‘The new 18000+ model for signage and display graphics will be a welcome development for our customers. The range of applications this printer enables, printing on paper, styrene, corrugated plastic and more at very high speeds, keeps Delta Group ahead in its ability to meet every customer need in the display graphics space.’
A preview was given at Fespa of the EFI Reggiani EcoTerra, a new all-in-one ‘eco-friendly’ pigment-based textile roll printer that requires neither pre- not post-treatment for the fabrics it prints, thus reducing its footprint, energy and water usage. The EcoTerra offers a seven-colour ink set (CMYK plus blue, red and green) for expanded colour gamut and is claimed to achieve excellent wet and dry colour fastness with sharp detail and high durability. An enhanced polymerisation and finishing unit is said to give a softer hand feel to finished printed fabrics. An analytics application, Query, for monitoring and reporting, is also in development, and Reggiani demonstrated a partnership with textile RIP software developer Inèdit at the show in Berlin.
EFI also used Fespa to confirm the availability of Fiery Impress, an ‘affordable ready-to-go’ DFE that should suit smaller OEM customers, announced at its Connect event in January 2022. ‘This isn’t some RIP trying to be an industrial digital front end,’ said EFI Fiery VP of Sales and Marketing John Henze, ‘This is the market-leading industrial Fiery DFE taking inkjet printing to the next level and making market adoption easier.’
Also now available are the Prep-It nesting software and IQ production monitoring and analysis suite for wide format applications. No availability date was given for the EcoTerra direct-to-fabric printer.
