Technology Guide: Digital Printing

CANON C800

Canon, which was the original digital colour printer with its CLC series, has jumped into the crowded and rapidly growing entry-level digital market with a line of three printers which it says are designed to make money for printers.

Canon says as a late entrant the C800 was built from the ground up to be best in its class. This has been proven globally with customers experiencing exceptional reliability and registration across a wide-variety of paper types. Canon says its customers will get ‘a hell of a lot for not a massive investment.’

The company claims the printer has the fastest speed, best image quality and resolution, and will accept the widest range of paper weights in the light production market.

The C800 comes in 60, 70 and 80 A4 sheets a minute versions and prints at 2400dpi on 52-300gsm paper automatically duplexing up to 300gsm.

It also features a range of inline finishing options and a choice of EFI Fiery, Océ PRISMAsync or Creo controllers to support our customers preferred workflow. The imagePress C800 has a duty cycle of 500,000 pages, while the C700 runs at 70ppm and has a duty cycle of 400,000 pages.

It can maintain its rated speed (up to 220gsm) even at high quality settings and uses variable drop size for better image quality. It also has flexibility with paper stocks and finishing options, you have the freedom to choose what you need for your business. It even includes perfect binding. Target market is small commercial printers, offset printers getting into digital, franchises, inplants, and digital print businesses.

FUJI XEROX COLOUR C70

The Colour C70 is an affordable digital colour solution with application versatility, professional image quality and scalability to grow with the business.

Purpose built for both high value applications and everyday work, the C70 offers the flexibility and productivity of a multifunction device with a higher level of quality and finishing for creative and production teams. With print, copy and scan functions, the C70 has true multi-tasking abilities of print and scan with PC, USB and email, saving time and steps by sending prints from any smart phone or tablet.

The Colour C70 prints up to 70 colour pages per minute and 75 black-and-white pages per minute on uncoated and coated stock up to 300gsm and 220gsm for auto duplexing.

Fuji Xerox says the Colour C70 can capture new business and keep more applications in-house by creating customer brochures, proposals, posters, window decals or polyester signs. It features 2,400 x 2,400dpi resolution and Fuji Xerox Special Polyester EA Low Melt Toner so high image quality is delivered every time.

It offers modularity and server options, enterprise workflows to reduce print costs with Xerox Standard Accounting, security enhancements with password protected PDFs, Print and Secure Print, and flexible feeding and finishing options including stapling, hole punching, folding and face trimming, and four standard paper trays.

Fuji Xerox Finance offers financing for all equipment, and has been providing finance solutions to its customers for over 30 years with approximately 75 per cent of all Fuji Xerox equipment financed through Fuji Xerox Finance.

Complete installation and training is performed over two days, with installation of the device taking up to two hours and a day and a half allocated to operator training.

HP INDIGO 7800

HP’s Indigo 7000 series has always been the high-speed high-volume press for SRA3 cut-sheet applications. The 7800 is the top-of-the-range SRA3 machine. It is aimed at printers who have volumes needing its high throughput but don’t need a bigger sheet. The target markets are general commercial printers, photo printers and publications printers.

Like all the Indigo machines it uses HP’s ElectroInk liquid toner technology. All toner-based machines use lasers to write the image. The key difference is that the colorants are suspended in liquid rather than as a dry powder, which means the resulting prints look more like those produced by conventional inks.

Inside the 7800 are a combination of new features and existing technology from both the 10000 and the 5600 that 7000 series customers had been asking for to improve quality, productivity and application range. From the 10000 the 7800 gets its on-press inline spectrophotometer, while from the 5600 it gets the one-shot printing option. In one-shot mode all the colours are assembled on the blanket and then transferred to the substrate in ‘one shot’.

There are three advantages: for heat-sensitive materials it prevents registration issues, on delicate material it reduces the chance of scratches and for photo applications it ensure extremely tight registration for the highest quality and sharpness.

There’s no speed penalty in one-shot mode, but it does result in an increased click charge of around 50 per cent. It is only justifiable for high-value applications and substrates. The spectrophotometer carries out a number of functions.

As it is in the press it can automatically create a substrate profile for new stocks, which can then be shared with any other Indigo. This is a big aid for smaller firms that can’t afford to employ a colour specialist.

The mechanical speed of the press is 120 A4 ppm, but HP says the productivity benefits come from the new features that improve uptime and reduce the need for intervention, such as the spectrophotometer and Smart Scheduling.

Smart Scheduling analyses the jobs in the queue and reorganises them by substrate, sheet size, colour, and print mode. HP claims that by minimising changeovers it can increase productivity by 50 per cent.

There’s also the EPM option, which produces a 33 per cent speed increase and lower costs over conventional CMYK by dropping the black ink. It’s the opposite of UCR/GCR.

The 7800 is as happy churning out volume work flat-out on standard stock as it is producing added-value work using the range of special colours and printing effects on challenging textured, synthetic and metallic substrates.

HP is also keen to highlight the eco credential of the press. New on the 7800 is the regeneration of the imaging oil, eliminating the need to top up the oil and safely dispose of the waste. All Indigos are now supplied with the carbon footprint of their production offset.

KONICA MINOLTA BIZHUB C1100

The bizhub Press C1100 has been designed by Konica Minolta as the company’s fastest cut-sheet system, achieving speeds up to 100ipm.

The Press C1100 is suited to the production of high volume digital colour prints for commercial printers, mail houses and print on demand requirements, with a monthly duty cycle of one million prints, and an engine life of 20 million impressions.

The C1100’s print speed doesn’t need to be reduced based on media weight and type. Speed is only reduced by the sheet size — at Super fast it will print 5,192 A4 impressions per hour and 3,180 A3 impressions per hour.

Its resolution reaches 1,200 X 1,200dpi 8-bit. A large range of media types is supported, in weights from 55gsm to 350gsm, both for simplex and duplex printing.

The C1100 system can be expanded to a maximum of nine large capacity paper trays, or 13,890 sheets, with tray switching and media reloading on the fly. For paper feeding, the C1100 uses variable air suction and air separation feeding from all paper trays.

The C1100 has a large range of inline finishing units that can be added to suit specific requirements.

These include a 5,000-sheet stacker, Konica Minolta’s 50-sheet (200 pages) saddle-stitch booklet unit with for-edge trimming, an inline folding unit that can produce up to six different folds, 100-sheet staple finisher and a 300-page perfect binder.

The bizhub Press C1100 accommodates paper sizes up to 330 x 487mm, and handles a maximum printing area of 321 x 480mm, and when including crop marks will print A3 (one-up) or A4 (two-up).

Three different print controllers are available from EFI, Creo and Konica Minolta, with JDF support, APPE and Pantone colour library functionality.

Konica Minolta’s service extends across the entire range of print systems, with two-hour service response across its direct operations. Its Production Print designated help desk is normally the first point of contact for customers, with fully trained technicians on the phone to resolve any issues.

Production print operator training is supplied by dedicated PPG trainers at its showroom facilities for a full day.

MGI JETVARNISH 3DS

The JETvarnish 3DS is designed and manufactured by MGI and Konica Minolta for printers to expand their services to include spot UV and 3D tactile varnishing capabilities, with inkjet productivity and efficiency benefits. The 3DS is able to spot varnish on digital and offset prints with and without lamination.

It can turn regular printed jobs into high-margin spot UV jobs, or even higher margin 3D embossed jobs with up to 100 microns of varnish applied to the sheet, which lifts the image from the page and adds a higher level of sheen to colours. This impact can be used to renew interest and lift the message or product.

The JETvarnish 3DS spot UV coater is now available with a foil finishing option. The iFoil-S offers a hot foil stamping process so a coloured foil layer can be applied on top of the spot coating, adding a finish that will stand out from any other foil system currently available, inline or offline.

This hot stamp foil inline system is able to produce a varied gradation layer of the foil on the final finish based on the thickness of the UV coating applied, thereby producing a solid dark foil layer to a light gradation layer anywhere on the printed sheet. No other hot foil stamping system can produce this level of foil attachment and this shade effect.

The digitisation of spot UV finishing allows printers to take a few sheets from each job and spot UV coat it so customers can see the effect. This makes the 3DS ideal for lucrative short and medium run printing.

The combination of MGI’s inkjet technology with Konica Minolta’s drop-on-demand Piezoelectric print heads enables fine lines as small as 0.5mm or as wide as the whole sheet.

HubManager software follows jobs, manages job queues, creates job tickets, recalls reprints and adjusts the ARC camera system in one tool.

The JETvarnish 3DS is equipped with automated registration camera (ARC) technology to calibrate (on-the-fly) coating registration from sheet to sheet. The first camera reads printed marks and automatically corrects for changes in the X and Y position of each sheet. The second camera detects the paper skew and makes adjustments on the fly.

Sales and service are available through Konica Minolta’s direct and dealer network across Australia.

RICOH PRO C7100/7100X

With a price that Ricoh says suits even small to mid-size printers, the Ricoh Pro C7100 series prints at speeds of 80ppm and supports media weights up to 360gsm in both simplex and duplex.

An optimal image quality of 1,200 x 4,800dpi is achieved with Ricoh’s Vertical Cavity Surface Emitting Laser (VCSEL) technology. It delivers a premium finish, supports a range of media including textured media, and suits various applications such as light packaging, direct mail, books, six-page brochures and envelopes, among others.

Its features include print speeds of 80ppm, precise sheet-to-sheet and front-to-back registration achieved with mechanical registration, large capacity vacuum fed trays with a long sheet printing option, and a self-maintained liquid cooling system. This keeps the developer at a constant temperature to provide greater consistency of image quality and fewer disruptions in extended print runs.

It uses an AC-transfer system and elastic fusing belt technology to improve output on a variety of heavily textured media, and supports auto-duplex of 360gsm. It can handle a maximum sheet size of 330mm x 700mm to create six-page A4 brochures or A4 landscape books.

Included in the series is the Ricoh Pro C7100X, which utilises an additional fifth colour station providing clear and white toner. This feature will open up new markets to printers and enable additional revenue from existing customers.

It is backed by Ricoh’s TCRU programme (Trained Customer Replaceable Units) which enables customers to replace more than a dozen parts for increased uptime.

The expansion of Ricoh’s media catalogue also allows users to adjust and control many different parameters per substrate to ensure the best image quality and robust reliability.

Ricoh offers a customer care program through to tailored customer training sessions.

SCREEN TRUEPRESS JET SX

Screen Australia managing director, Peter Scott, told ProPrint, “Screen GP is more active in digital web presses such as the Truepress Jet L350UV label machine and Truepress Jet 520 series, which can have a sheeter added to the finishing end, but there is also the Truepress Jet SX B2 inkjet device, with one installed at Benefitz in New Zealand. With its exclusive focus on inkjet for digital printing, we can expect to hear more from Screen GP in the future.”

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