Solid ink, which Xerox acquired when it bought Tektronix in 2000, is a piezo-electric inkjet technology that uses stainless steel printheads and heated solid ink.

"People know us for xerography, but we have as much intellectual property in solid ink," said Xerox Continuous Feed vice-president Jonathan Edwards.

"The technology is very important. As we've talked to more customers we've found they want the vendor to be the design authority for the heads and the ink; we have the rights to those technologies."

The specification of the first machine will be four-colour, 152m per minute 520mm-wide (2-up) for stocks between 45-160gsm, targeted at transactional, transpromo and direct mail applications.

"Job-to-job and roll-to-roll solid ink is more stable in the environments we're going after than aqueous inkjet, which compromises image quality," Edwards stated.

He added that solid ink was also more resilient to paper dust than aqueous inkjet, which can be an issue when using low-cost stocks.

"Transactional printing is a defined market with printers meeting increasingly tough service level agreements," said Edwards. "One of the key issues is the use of low-grade paper to keep costs down. An inkjet receptive coating adds another cou- ple of hundreds of pounds per tonne to the cost of the paper."

In addition to CMYK the solid ink continuous machine is configured with additional print channels, one of which will be used to offer a spot or flood clear coat, like the firm's latest cut sheet toner machine the Colour 800/1000.

At Drupa, the firm talked about the UV-cured gel-ink inkjet technology it was working on. Chief executive Anne Mulcahy, said at the time that the firm would use its solid ink technology in production printing machines before commercialising gel-ink.

Technology solid ink piezo- electric inkjet
Inkset CMYK plus two additional channels for spots and coating
Speed 152m/minute

Web width 520mm
Stock range 45-160gsm
Target sectors transactional, transpromo and direct mail