Photonic printing is the creation of Lumejet's director of innovation Dr Trevor Elworthy, a former Kodak research scientist who devised a way to 'print' a 4 micron dot onto light sensitive media.

The media itself is silver halide-based and unlike any other print technology it creates an RGB image (from red, green and blue dyes embedded in the paper) which has a much wider gamut than CMYK.

The result is continuous tone photographic quality with an equivalent half-tone resolution of 8,000dpi from an exposure of just 400dpi.

The Coventry-based manufacturer launched its first product, the LumeJet S200, last year and announced that it was looking at wider web and duplex options for its next developments.

It has now revealed that it is working on a high speed industrial print version of the Lumejet S200, which instead of using a dual print head (DPH) that traverses the sheet, will be made up of multiple DPHs mounted onto a bar that runs across the full width of the media.

The LumeBar will be custom-built, with the number of separate LumeChips (the photonic equivalent of an inkjet printhead), required dot output size, wavelength and power all tuned to the specific application.

Lumejet said that the LumeBar was some two to three years away from commercial production but that it was already working on the development "in association with leading labelling technology manufacturers".