Meanwhile the relative tiddler RTI Digital is proving adept at selling its Memjet powered Vortex 4200 printers under the noses of the big boys.
All of them use thermal heads and aqueous inks, which confines them to printing on paper and some specially coated plastics, so they have limited outdoor applications compared with solvent or UV printers. Both the rival technologies use water-based inks – Memjet uses dye-based colorants while PageWide uses pigment. Dyes tend to be brighter but have a shorter fade resistance than pigments.
Initial target markets were repro, in the sense of printing plans, maps, CAD drawings and renderings, plus POS and some posters. They are often pitched as replacements for ageing monochrome electrophotographic printers, which by no coincidence were previously supplied by Canon’s Océ subsidiary and Xerox’s former Engineering Solutions division. HP also sold a lot of its much slower Designjet multi-pass printers into the same markets, as customers increasingly asked for colour sheets alongside the mono.
It’s been almost a year since HP announced that it was going to put its single-pass thermal inkjet printhead array technology into 40in (1,016mm) wide-format printers that it calls the PageWide XL series. Four models are being announced initially, with shipping dates between September and January (the top-end models will ship first). Pricing hasn’t been announced, although Thomas Valjak, EMEA general manager of HP’s large-format design business, predicts costs will be about £1.20/m2, less than half that of a multi-pass HP Designjet Z-series inkjet.
HP will showcase the technology at Fespa this week, having previously demonstrated a PageWide device at the UK’s Sign & Digital show in March.
Speeds are quoted as 8ppm (A1) with the XL 4000, 12ppm with the XL 4500, 14ppm with the XL 5000, up to an impressive 30ppm with the top XL 8000. XL 4000 is mainly intended for design studios and the like, with the option to add a scanner to produce a large multifunction printer. The XL 4500 and 5000 are enterprise models with better networking and security. The top 8000 is a high-throughput machine for commercial print and repro shops.
Optional peripherals will include a fast, wide scanner, high-capacity stacker, online folder running at full print speed, and integral stacker.
The thermal printheads are well proven; they’re the same as HP already uses in its big T-series high-speed inkjet web presses for markets such as direct mail and books, and in the compact low-cost OfficeJet Pro-X series of office printers. It is also adapting the head technology for its forthcoming MultiJet Fusion 3D printers, due next year.
Comparisons
It’s hard to compare speeds between different inkjet technologies, as there are many ifs and buts about media speed, resolution and downtime during cleaning cycles. However, it seems that the fastest XL 8000 (which runs at 1,200 dpi across the width) is rather faster and more productive overall than the 42in Memjet OEMs running at 800x1,600dpi (they can also run full 1,600dpi at half speed). Both types can print up to A0 formats and the Memjet based RTI can handle continuous banners.
The speed as demonstrated at Sign & Digital UK was certainly impressive, and plan prints looked very sharp. The sample graphics posters weren’t so good though and not a patch on the glossy, high-resolution results that RTI Digital was knocking out on its Vortex 4200 a few metres away on the CMYUK stand. This could have been down to HP’s choice of paper, but its halftone dithering was nothing special either.
Last year HP hinted at graphics models to follow the initial plan printers models. Since then it has announced High Definition Nozzle Architecture, a double-resolution five-level greyscale printhead that will slot in as a direct replacement on its T-Series presses from next year on. It would be reasonable to assume that HDNI heads could be adapted for PageWide arrays, though nobody at HP is officially commenting on this.
Established alternatives
Prototype wide-format printers using 42in single-pass Memjet printhead arrays first appeared at Drupa 2012 and started reaching the market a year or two later. Four companies now build printers based on these arrays: Canon offers the Océ ColorWave 900, RTI Digital has the Vortex 4200, Xanté makes the unique sheet-fed Excelagraphix 42 carton printer and Xerox with its IJP2000. Despite the common core technology, each of these machines is quite different.
“It’s taken a while for our OEMs to start actively selling,” says Kevin Shimamoto, vice-president sales and marketing for Memjet wide format in the US. “They’ve had to pass a learning curve of how to manufacture, sell, service and support a single-pass wide-format printer to this marketplace. They’ve been out in the market for about a year and they’re really assessing what the markets are, what the optimised target market segments are, what the optimised applications are, and really fine-tuning their market solutions around those, either with the X-Y cutters take-up reels, different media configurations, or different software solutions.”
While there will be enhancements of the announced models at Fespa, Shimamoto says that next year’s Drupa will mark a significant step forward for the Memjet technologies. “We’ll be introducing the next generation of the technology – the third generation,” he says.
The second-generation systems will apparently use pigment inks while the third generation is an entirely new “mechanical” technology that uses microscopic flaps rather than pressure chambers. “At Fespa we won’t be launching the third generation, but we hope to be launching the second generation printhead inks, driver solutions, and then showcasing the mechanical head,” he says.
In the meantime, he’s putting a brave face on the prospect of competition from HP: “They’re betting on single pass and that just strengthens our position, when we’ve been out for three to five years saying this is what we envisage to be the next stage of wide-format printing.”
The Vortex 4200 was developed by a Hungarian company, OWN-X and Canadian company RTI (Reprographic Technology International) was originally its distributor. Last year RTI bought OWN-X and set up RTI Digital to make and sell both wide-format and label printers.
RTI’s European business director Peter Barton has long experience in this market, having worked for Océ in the years when it was dominating the electrophotographic plan printing market. “The engines we’re getting from Memjet now are much more stable than we were getting originally,” he says. “While they don’t tell you what changes there are, if you know what to look for you see subtle things that weren’t there before, like choke filters on power supply leads and things like that. When we set up for a show before, we’d always make sure we got there plenty early enough to get them running and stable. We don’t worry about that too much now. We basically un-crate them and away we go.”
Canon’s Océ ColorWave 900 has been shipping for almost a year now. “It’s had lots of firmware upgrades and enhancements along the way,” says Dominic Fahy, UK business group manager for display graphics. It was most recently demonstrated at the UK’s Sign & Digital show in March and will be at Fespa with an enhanced folder.
“Océ is still very big in the toner market, and the ColorWave 900 is being used by plan printers,” Fahy says. However, the colour capability, high quality and high throughput is also allowing the company to go into other markets. “We are promoting its high quality and speed to go into graphics applications such as retail posters,” he says.
“Our experience with the 9800 is seen in the engineering of the feed and paper transport. The speed the paper moves is a challenge.” At maximum, this is about 300mm per second. To cope with this throughput, Canon has developed a square stacker and an inline folder, which are optional extras.
Like Xerox, Canon has lowered its price significantly over the past year and it now starts at about £80,000 for a basic model with no finishing other than a sheet cutter and delivery table. This is about the same as the Vortex 4200 price. An inline stacker and a folder will add about £20,000 each.
As an aside, the popularity of Océ machines in the architectural plan printing market also seems to have influenced Canon’s decision earlier this year to partner with 3D Systems to resell 3D printing machines.
Xerox’s IJP2000 first appeared as a Fuji-Xerox prototype at Drupa 2012 and started reaching European users the following year. The past year has seen the list price fall about 10% to a starting point of just under £100,000. At Fespa, a Fotoba FHS42 XY cutter is expected to be demonstrated inline with an IJP2000, a combination that takes just five seconds to produce a trimmed full-bleed print.
Graham Chapman, Xerox’s marketing manager for wide-format, says that customers are a mix of “inplants, repro, quickprint, in fact a variety of PSPs”.
He adds: “Some are used for mainly plan printing and technical documents, but most are being used for poster and display graphics – particularly in addressing a need for quick-turnaround and print-on-demand, and also where the value of variable data and targeted messaging is being increasing realised.”
User's view: Vortex goes to sea
RTI Digital’s Vortex 4200 has proved reliable with a robust paper transport, according to the manufacturer’s business development manager Peter Barton. This influenced a recent high-profile sale of three of the printers to the UK Hydrographics Office (UKHO), a government owned printing operation that produces millions of nautical charts every year for the Royal Navy and merchant shipping operations worldwide.
UKHO operates three conventional offset presses and before it chose the Vortex it had been using a Canon Océ ColorWave multi-pass inkjet with CrystalPoint solid ink technology. This has water-resistant inks, but is much slower than a single-pass inkjet.
Head of department Paul Kelly is somewhat constrained because government departments aren’t supposed to endorse particular commercial products, but he’s happy to talk about the advantages that high-speed digital is bringing. “We chose them through open selection,” he says. “We did some very detailed selection, looking at the Memjet technology from different suppliers. We offered people the opportunity to do a month’s production testing at our premises before we purchased. Canon and RTI came on site and we operated them for a month.”
The print doesn’t have to be fully water-proof, he says, but it has to be water-resistant. UKHO worked with its paper supplier to come up with a material that works with the aqueous Memjet inks.
Three 4200s were bought, with one intended as a spare but increasingly being used for production as the use of digital expands. “We have a plan to transition to all-digital,” says Kelly. “Memjet technology has allowed us to move from 5% digital on-demand to 35%.”
Going digital allows UKHO to respond quickly to changes and by reducing stock levels it will reduce the amount of wastage when charts have to be changed. “It’s a live product – all stock subject to change, on-demand,” Kelly explains. “If some information comes in that requires a safety notice to be issued, then that product has to be replaced regardless of stock levels. This technology enables us to print to customer order, and our aim in the next 15 months is to move to 100% printing to customer order. The intention is to move across to digital to get to print-on-demand.”
