FFEI is a world-class manufacturer of precision electronic and imaging kit at its Peterborough site, now joined by one in China. They manufacture film imagesetters together with the range of Fujifilm Luxel platesetters. Current developments are to reduce the CTP cost and they have a manual B1 violet diode machine with an end-user price that the firm has hinted will be spectacularly lower than current UK prices. This is being snapped up in China with some 60 units shipped there this year. FFEI came out of Crosfield Electronics via Fujifilm. As a result, it is
particularly strong in colour quality and management and also workflow.

The Crosfield background means FFEI personnel know many of Xaar’s senior management who came from the same stable. They know the inkjet technology and were impressed by the newest head, the Xaar 1001. When FFEI was part of Fujifilm it had Sericol in the group which distributes Inca Digital’s scanning head large-format flatbed inkjet printers. So FFEI decided to concentrate on single-pass printing from a fixed array of heads with the substrate passing underneath.

Joint venture
At last year’s Ipex, FFEI met with Nilpeter, which is strong in the flexo label market, and the companies signed a development agreement in June 2006 that led to the launch of the Caslon a little over a year later. The project followed a holistic approach to provide high-quality narrow web print for the label market on film and paper. It looked at the front end workflow and high-speed data delivery, colour management and screening, the inkjet UV ink, curing, substrate treatment and Nilpeter’s press expertise in tension control.

The modular Caslon can be standalone or part of a hybrid line with flexo print and various finishing options as required. There is a web cleaner and corona discharge unit before the inkjet print unit. This allows standard substrates to be used with excellent adhesion and flexibility of the final print, which are significant advantages over alternative digital print technologies, according to FFEI.

The machine is available in either 330mm or 500mm web width, initially as a four-colour process but with the option of up to six stations. There is a retractable housing around the inkjet heads aligned in an arc to keep dust out and mask stray UV from the curing units. It uses special Caslon Jetink, supplied by Nilpeter, that has been formulated specifically for the machine to optimise runs and printability. There are two machine speeds, 25m or 50m per minute, determined by the grey levels specified. The quality is good, like flexo but with good highlight detail supplied through the stochastic screening. If you are attending LabelExpo, make sure you look at the 3.5m panorama of the Thames – it is quite a sight.

In inkjet the print speed is measured as square metres per hour. The wider version is 750m2 per hour and in commercial print terms this is 200 A4 ppm, much faster than all single-engined laser print engines. Every drop from every nozzle is controlled by data supplied on-the-fly from the powerful bank of servers connected to the heads, with FFEI’s engineers providing very fast data transfer of colour managed optimised files allowing total variability of all print.

The operator interface is a flat touchscreen that allows considerable command and simple drag and drop control. The set-up is intended to be carried out in pre-press with the file optimised for the particular substrate, and so can be characterised and calibrated accordingly for colour and pre-conditioning.