Kodak claims stream inkjet will
rival offset (29.01.08)
At Drupa Kodak will show a “Concept” high speed industrial
inkjet printer prototype incorporating a technology that it claims will
rival offset press quality and production costs. It’s based on
Kodak’s new Stream continuous flow, single-pass print head technology,
and a commercially available model is tipped for launch in 2010. By
2015 Kodak predicts that Stream will have captured 1% of the offset
market – seemingly a modest ambition until it points out that
this is in excess of a trillion pages.
“Our inkjet strategy is based on our belief that inkjet will
have a dramatic effect on the printing industry over the next ten years,” said
Antonio Perez, chairman and CEO of Eastman Kodak Company. “Kodak
has made the commitment to invest in inkjet, based on our unmatched
expertise in digital imaging and materials science. This combination
today allows Kodak to provide our customers with best-in-class
technologies for the consumer market. In May, at Drupa, we
will again apply our unique
knowledge of printing to present a breakthrough advance in
high volume production inkjet through our revolutionary Stream
Inkjet Technology.”
Previous fast continuous-flow colour inkjets have largely been limited
to either dye inks on uncoated stocks, or expensive inkjet-specific
coatings (an exception being the UV-cured Dotrix). Kodak says that the
pigment inks developed for Stream will dry satisfactorily on conventional
coated and uncoated print stocks, including gloss stocks.
Bill Lloyd, chief technology officer for inkjet
solutions at Kodak Graphic Communications Group, predicted
that the Stream technology will
be useable in a range of future single-pass inkjets for either
roll or sheet-feeding, and he told Image Reports that it
is technically scalable
for wide formats, though he wouldn’t comment on the economics
of this.
Stream has been under development for some years,
and Kodak actually talked about it at Drupa 2004, without
showing anything in public. Lloyd
stressed that the projected offset-rivalling quality comes
from a combination of the new head’s “drop delivery” with inks and media
developments. “we’ve invested in MEMS technology, a way
of building the heads with very precise control,” he said.
The Stream Concept press is running trials at Kodak’s Inkjet
Printing Solutions HQ in Dayton, Ohio, and this will be taken to Drupa
in May. According to Kodak’s description, it will have a resolution
in excess of 600 dpi, small ink droplet size, high accuracy
of drop placement, and production speeds in excess of 152 metres
per minute.
At a pre-Drupa press conference in early January,
Kodak showed two sample prints from the Stream Concept printer,
though it would not allow
them to be taken away. The colour halftones looked very good
on semi-gloss paper, and certainly much better than today’s Kodak Versamark
Vx5000 inkjet quality, though without a direct comparison to an offset
sample it wasn’t possible confirm the relative quality.
“With the benefits of offset class quality, reliability, throughput,
and cost of operation, Stream Technology will be the platform to enable
more printers to take full advantage of digital growth opportunities
using inkjet,” claimed Isidre Rosello, general manager of Kodak
Inkjet Printing Solutions.
“Stream Technology provides a number of flexible features to
meet the needs of commercial printers for applications like direct mail,
catalogues, and free standing inserts,” said Ronen Cohen, vp of
marketing for Inkjet Printing Solutions. “Stream Technology is
one of the foundations that will solidify Kodak’s leadership in
inkjet innovations. The feedback from the demonstrations in
Dayton has been fantastic.”
* Also new at Drupa will be the Versamark VL2000, a drop-on-demand
single-pass full-colour inkjet printer with piezo heads. It will be
able to print 1,100 A4 pages per minute with up to 600 x 600 dpi resolution,
on a reel width of 47.4 cm. Kodak says it is aimed at data centres with
volumes of more than 1 million images per month of transactional, promotional
and transpromo documents, such as billing, account statements and direct
mail.
So far only the US and Canada prices have been revealed:
a two-up simplex configuration is expected to be less than
$1.6 million (about £800,000)and
for a for a two-up duplex configuration it is expected to be less than
$2.95 million (£1.5 m). Contact: www.kodak.com
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