Fujifilm Sericol was the first serious player in the UV flatbed wide-format market with the Inca range. In Australia, it has also had a presence in the small-format roll-to-roll world as an authorised Mutoh reseller. But until the recent launch of its Uvistar UV-cured 3.5m- and 5m-wide roll-to-roll printers, known as UVRs, it hadn’t had a presence in the grand-format roll-to-roll market.
“Fujifilm has a gained a lot of experience in the high productivity inkjet market with machines such as Inca range of flatbeds, but to this point we’ve never been able to offer a roll to roll product for customers,” says Paul Budgen. area business manger at Fujifilm Australia.
“Both locally and globally, this is a market where we’ve been looking to use our ink formulating experience and work with a third party to produce a innovative solution for this market.”
UV ink is not new to the sector but, in the past, a price premium and a problem with adhesion onto flexible substrates restricted its uptake.
“The reason we went for a UV machine is that our core competency is UV. We have been a leader in UV inks in analogue and digital and we see there is some benefits for this format in UV that haven’t been exploited so far,” says Budgen.
Fujifilm Sericol marketing manager Tudor Morgan says: “We know that, at some point, printers will move to UV. When they do, we want them to migrate to the Uvistar.”
There’s a growing argument for UV, with prices coming down and the flexibility issue being addressed. Also, the trend towards polyethylene (PE)-based billboards favours UV, as you can’t print onto PE using solvent.
PE’s adoption has increased in response to brands’ desires for a higher quality print and the tendency towards one-piece and backlit displays. While PVC can deliver one-piece and backlit posters, it’s trumped by PE when it comes to strength, weight and recyclability. Although the use of PE is rising, it still makes up a relatively small proportion of the poster market worldwide and is almost non-existent here.
Morgan says: “Only around 10% of poster sites today [in Europe] are PE and, with the small number of firms currently addressing the market, it represents a massive opportunity.”
In Australia, this hasn’t been adopted, says Budgen. But that should change as the market responds to the price and environmental advantages of PE.
“The Uvistar machine works well with a recyclable substrates in the billboard market and to date no one has got the same results with solvent. PE is a lighter gauge substrate so it is cheaper plus it has the added advantage of being recyclable.
“We are not far from the point where that kind of substrate might be legislated. We know in Europe there is a push toward making that kind of substrate mandatory for billboards. This is a 350m2 an hour machine and that combined with the fact you can use recyclable cheaper substrates just gives any billboard producer a competitive advantage,” adds Budgen.
Range of applications
However, in order to succeed, the Uvistar needs to have more than one application. It is something Fujifilm Sericol says it has already addressed.
“Just because it’s good at billboards, it doesn’t mean it doesn’t have a wide range of capabilities,” says Budgen. “The first time I saw it, I was impressed with its versatility. It can handle everything from crashing out one-piece PE posters to boutique work, where it’s particularly good at chopping and changing between substrates. For the printer currently changing rolls four or five times per day, that’s significant.”
Morgan adds: “Customers buying the 3m machine will definitely want to produce more than just posters. They will want to produce point-of-sale, backlit and exhibition graphics. The quality has to be good enough for those applications.”
Another point in its favour in a cost-conscious market is that it wastes less substrate than rivals – only 35cm – when other devices may need a metre or more.
It is Fujifilm Sericol’s hope that Uvistar’s ink will set it apart from rivals.
“We identified the problems other inks had when printing onto PE were scratch- and water-resistance,” says Morgan.
The QK inks use the firm’s Micro V technology and were in development for a couple of years. Fujifilm worked hard to make them tough and flexible enough to cope with the demands of the sector.
In addition, the company says that the inks’ high optical density produces punchier colours, which, they claim, means users can save money by laying down 30-40% less ink to get the same result as rival products.
“We’ve run test files on rival machines. When you compare output to the Uvistar, we have the edge on quality and speed. According to UK clients who’ve seen the output, our one-pass work is sellable in the billboard market,” says Morgan.
However, most firms opt to use the brighter inks to add impact, rather than just cut costs.
“The ink mileage is good, but once they’ve seen samples, most customers want brighter colours, which brings the mileage down a little,” he says. “But even with the brighter result, ink costs will be 20% below that of rivals.”
As the machine was originally designed as a hybrid – although Fujifilm Sericol has decided not to offer the table that enables it to handle rigid sheets – it can handle a wide range of substrates up to 250m. Nor do the thinnest and flimsiest stocks, such as woven PE fabrics, present a problem.
“For very thin and sensitive stocks you can raise the central section of the print area to keep tension up,” says Morgan. “We haven’t come across any type of media that we can’t handle.”
The printer itself is made by Israeli firm Matan Digital Printers, which sells the product under its own brand as the Barak. Matan has a strong pedigree – over the years it has engineered some of the most successful grand-format machines in the market.
“We looked at OEM machines, but the Barak ticked more of the boxes for us,” says Morgan. Fujifilm Sericol says the Uvistar is distinguished by its Uvijet inks and the firm’s distribution and application support clout. However, despite carrying the Fuji badge, it uses Ricoh heads, rather than Fuji’s Dimatix.
“Ricoh heads are an industrial head with a good droplet size,” says Morgan. “The same head is used in a lot of hybrid machines and it is very robust. We were impressed by the quality and reliability.”
The Ricoh heads are binary – that is, they have a single fixed droplet size, rather than the newer greyscale heads capable of producing different droplet volumes. The droplet size is 30pl and the resolution is 600dpi. Morgan argues that “for the applications it will be serving, it doesn’t need a greyscale head”.
Elsewhere, Matan has taken a different approach in engineering the machine to avoid vibrations.
“Conventional wisdom is you deal with vibration by using heavy materials,” says Morgan. “Matan’s approach is to use light-weight materials, but to engineer them to act as dampers to absorb vibrations.”
The result is a machine that, at 5.9 tonnes, is half the weight of some rivals. And it’s also priced to be lighter on the pocket than most rivals.
It may not weigh much, but the flexibility and build quality combined with the Uvijet QK inks make the Uvistar a production heavyweight.
Comment below to have your say on this story.
If you have a news story or tip-off, get in touch at editorial@sprinter.com.au.
Sign up to the Sprinter newsletter