Vortex 4200

Own-X has partnered with Winjet Color to further develop its printers, which are now being branded as Winjet Color machines under the Vortex product name. Winjet has enhanced the original Own-X machines, improving the interface and the diagnostics. Winjet has also added additional sensors to its label printer to adjust the gap between head and substrate to improve the performance with some difficult substrates.

Erik Norman, RTI’s vice president of sales and marketing, says that these features could be added to the wide-format machine in the future.

The Vortex 4200 is a roll-fed printer, aimed at the point-of-sale and CAD markets. It takes two rolls, using three-inch cores, and also has a sheet feeder, but is best suited to inkjet-coated media.

As noted, this printer uses the waterfall printhead developed by Memjet. The main feature of this is its extremely high speed, printing around 15cm/sec or nine metres per minute at a resolution of 1600 x 1600dpi, with a faster option of 18mpm at 1600 x 800dpi. This speed is down to the sheer number of nozzles – over 70,000, which produce up to 700 million drops per second.  It really is quite stunning to watch the prints shooting out of the front of the machine.

The actual head prints a 222mm wide print swathe but Memjet Technologies has developed a complete print engine that combines five of these heads together so that it can print a 1067mm (42in) width in a single pass – producing some 1100m2/hr. This print engine includes all the printheads, the associated electronics and the ink channels, making it extremely easy for OEM companies to add a paper transport system and develop a complete printer.

The main disadvantage of the Memjet heads is that they    only work with water-based inks, though Memjet is developing the printhead further to take other types of ink. But for now it’s only suitable for indoor applications, unless the prints are laminated. For this reason it’s also being targeted at the CAD market, though the print quality is considerably better than most CAD printers.

Also, since the Memjet head is a thermal drop-on-demand system, these heads are consumable items that will have to be replaced fairly frequently. They should be good for between 30 and 50m2, or roughly two to six litres of ink.

There are five ink channels per head, but the printers are four-colour – CMYK. The inks come from Memjet but are chipped to each OEM so that only RTI and its associated dealers will be  able to supply the inks for the Vortex. The inks themselves are dye-based.

The Vortex 4200 should cost €79,500, around £68,000. RTI, which has mainly dealt with consumables up to now has set up a new division, the Print Solutions Group, to handle hardware including this printer. At the time of writing the company was still in the process of setting up a dealer network but the printer should be available by next month.

Several other printer vendors have also looked at Memjet’s wide-format offering, but so far the Vortex is the only roll-based one available in the UK. Xanté also has a wide-format Memjet printer, the Excelagraphix 4200, but this is a sheetfed device and takes fairly thick media so it’s primarily targeted at packaging and prototyping. This also should be available in the UK within a few months.

In addition, both Océ and Fuji Xerox showed off wide-format Memjet printers at last year’s Drupa although these were both prototypes and it could be the end of this year before we see these appear, if at all.