Plastic bucket printing - One interesting announcement that shows the size of a segment of the market came from Xeikon. Jokey Plastik GmbH, a world leader in the manufacturing of plastic containers, has purchased no less than seven Xeikon digital color presses. The company took its first Xeikon press into production in September last year. This press is currently being used at full capacity, operating three shifts per day and seven days per week. An additional six presses will provide the capacity required to meet the sharp increase in demand for short runs of printed plastic containers. These plastic containers, often called buckets, are used for among other industries the paint trade and are used for holding industrial paints. The Xeikon presses print adhesive transfers for putting around the containers. Jokey Plastics employs 1,200 employees at 12 production plants in Europe, the Middle East, North Africa and Canada, serving customers worldwide. This order only covers a small proportion of the sites so no doubt if this is successful Xeikon can expect many more orders in future.

Xennia and Industrial Inkjet - Xennia is a UK organization specializing in the implementation of inkjet technologies mainly on an OEM basis. At drupa they were showing two developments using the new Xaar 1001 print heads built into substrate width arrays. The first of these was the XenJet X-plore 8000 single pass inkjet narrow web printer. This provides photo quality images for narrow web applications such as packaging labels and product decoration. The printer is supplied as a self contained unit comprising printhead module, re-circulating ink management system, control electronics, PC and software. The printhead module can be supplied with up to 16 printheads to print with an apparent resolution of over 1,000 dpi in widths up to 280 mm. The total system was be shown as the EcoJet by ALS Engineering from Germany and is offered mainly for label printing with ALS developed finishing equipment for laser cutting allowing labels, business cards, booklets, boxes etc to be produced.
A further product development from Xennia is their XenJet X-treme 9000 printer. This is high performance single pass wide print array product with a print width up to 1120 mm (44 inches) and with a speed of 24 meters/min at 360 dpi resolution. This is widest single pass print array I have yet seen. The print engine is designed for product and packaging decoration and manufacturing applications. The first implementation of this print engine is now entering production from Xennia's partner Creta Print a leading manufacturer of ceramic tile printing equipment.

Material Deposition - One of the most interesting areas for inkjet technology is material deposition and one example of this is in printed electronics. In this systems are very different and are designed to operate in clean room environments. A printer in this market is usually built around state of the art motion stages with solid granite bases, high performance air bearings and linear motors guaranteeing repeatability down to +/- one micron. Again Xennia is a player in this area using piezo printheads from Xaar and Dimatix. Dimatix were showing the first implementations of their new Samba inkjet platform. At drupa these heads were used in the Fujifilm JetPress 720 B2 format inkjet press. Dimatix indicated that these new heads are also being aimed at the materials deposition markets and they anticipate that in 2009 they will be able to image drop sizes as small as 0.1 picoliters. Today the smallest drops one sees from any printhead are around 1.5 picoliters.

FFEI Emblaze - Another inkjet product being shown at drupa came from the UK company FFEI and was being shown by Fujifilm. This is the Emblaze UV coater. This product uses the Xaar 1001 printhead in a 28 inch wide array and is used to spot or flood UV coat printed sheets. This system can also print a textured image. This could be the first of a range of such coaters and I would anticipate that Xaar could easily make a version to fit the B3 format digital presses such as the Xerox iGen3, iGen4 and Docucolor products. It takes a digital file to define the coating area and this can easily match the printed image. It also does not need an extraction system as the UV flood coater on the Xerox iGen3 requires.

Industrial printing is an area that does not draw the attention of major suppliers in the same way that both sheet and continuous feed color digital printing does. This area however has been a very good one for HP Indigo with its 4500 label press that now dominates the digital label printing market. It is a major area for growth and many of the inkjet companies are seeing it as one of the major business areas to concentrate upon.

Andrew Tribute
Managing Partner
Attributes Associates
Truro, UK.