"Our quality benchmark is litho, screen has been losing out at the top end of the market for several years," said Agfa Graphics inkjet systems vice president Richard Barham. "Screen print is done, we’re going after the work that today is being produced on the KBA 205. The new greyscale printing option on the M-Press and the Titan allow us to do that."
At SGIA in Las Vegas it launched the Jeti 3020 Titan, its first totally new Jeti, and an upgrade to the M-Press Tiger, which delivers both greyscale print quality and high productivity.
Like the M-Press Tiger, the Titan 3020 uses a modular design to which users can add features and upgrade rather than investing in a new machine.
"It uses what we learnt from the M-Press, allowing firms to start with a basic machine and to upgrade the chassis rather than changing the whole engine," said Barham.
The Titan 3020 is a 3x2m flatbed which replaces the Jeti 3150 and 3020 Continental.
The base model is a four-colour machine with 16 Ricoh Gen 4 heads, which can be upgraded to up to 48 heads. Additional heads can be used for extra inks such as light cyan and light magenta to reduce granularity, orange and green to extend the colour gamut and white and varnish, or to increase speed.
The throughput of the 16-head machine is 113sqm per hour, but with additional heads that can be doubled to 226sqm/hour.
Barham added that the Titan 3020 bridged the gap between the rest of Agfa’s portfolio and the M-Press and that it would compete with Durst’s Rho 800, EFI Vutek’s GS3200 HP’s 7500 and Inca’s Spyder V and Onset S20 depending on configuration.
"A fully-loaded Titan 302 certainly puts the squeeze on the FB7500 and S20, it’s got a bigger bed than the S20, is only slightly slower and the greyscale heads and 8picolitre drops deliver higher quality."
Pricing will be between £272,000 (€310,000) for the basic 16-head machine, up to £410,000 (€466,000) for the 48-head machine.
The greyscale upgrade for the M-Press Tiger increases resolution and reduces granularity, to improve image quality for cosmetics and fashion applications. To take advantage of the new capability the firm has introduced a fine art print mode.
It has also increased the throughput of the Tiger to 1,267sqm/hour, which the firm claimed made it the fastest, as well as the highest quality, machine on the market.
Agfa also launched the Jeti 3348, a 3.25m-wide roll-to-roll solvent machine that features a new drying technology called TurbTech, to produce what it claims is a class-beating throughput of 232sqm/hr.
