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Browning's .50-caliber machine gun firest up to 600 rounds a minute; Kyocera's KJ4 printheads image more than 700 letter-sized sheets a minute.
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By Darek Johnson, Vince Cahill
In August, digital-print maven and ST columnist Sophie Matthews-Paul provided observations from the Drupa tradeshow (Düsseldorf). This month, Vince Cahill, a digital-print authority, observes how mechanical-electrical-manufactured (MEMs) printhead technology (see ST, July 2008, page 22), shown at Drupa, has steadily advanced from narrow- to wide-format print machines. MEMs, applied nanotechnology, are becoming popular in various industries; your car’s airbags and stability system use MEMs-built sensors, for example.
At Drupa, Vince examined several small, but super-high-speed, digital printers that use narrow gauge, MEMs-built, printhead systems. Because such printhead systems are expandable, these freshly introduced, MEMs-equipped printers are models for forthcoming, large-format, printhead structures. Surely, any savvy, print-systems engineer, after having read Vince’s observations, could imagine a MEMs-equipped, Gerber EDGE®-sized machine that applies 1,200-dpi, UV-cure inks onto 13-in.-wide media at 328 ft./min. (see Miyakoshi, below). Now, imagine one that’s 8 ft. wide.
Drupa 2008 once again heralded new, print-process solutions. Print-technology providers, especially European-based-ones, target Drupa as their venue to introduce new and projected products. This year, Drupa more than lived up to its reputation because print-machine manufacturers’ unveiled print solutions and innovations that will truly change the way image producers print.
Most importantly, perhaps, Drupa 2008 marked the ready-for-market arrival of high-resolution, page-wide- array, drop-on-demand inkjet printers. You may have encountered harbingers for such solutions at Drupa 2004, with the FastJet printer demonstrations from Sun Chemical and Inca Digital. Also, Kodak’s binary, continuous-inkjet printer established inkjet technology’s viability for high-speed, commercial printing and addressing. Additional Drupa 2004 machine demonstrations from Miyakoshi (with Panasonic printheads), and others foreshadowed drop-on-demand inkjet technology competing with (not just supplementing) conventional, analog and electrophotographic print methods.
In 2008, the development and manufacture of MEMs-technology printheads, alongside other automated processes, has enabled narrow-gauge, print-machine manufacturers to build arrayed printheads, and this has significantly reduced print systems’ cost per nozzle. MEMs technology has also improved targeting methods on equipped, piezo-based, inkjet-print systems.
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