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Digital Inks : Heralding sustainable business growth
Streamline inks use the same solvent type as the original equipment manufacturers’ inks, to ensure they are fully compatible with the print heads and printing systems
The wide format graphics market for inkjet inks is incredibly large with the solvent inkjet market currently worth close to US$1bn and the water-based market worth approximately US$2bn.
This market has traditionally been dominated by inks from the original equipment manufacturers but more recently the trend is for companies like Sun Chemical to apply their knowledge of graphic arts into this marketplace and to develop after-market sales.
Sun Chemical Screen’s business and marketing director, Trevor Pratt, said: “Sun Chemical Screen, the screen and digital after-market inks division of Sun Chemical, now offers its Streamline range of solvent-based inks for most leading wide and super-wide format inkjet printers in a massive market.
“Streamline inks use the same solvent type as the original equipment manufacturers’ inks, to ensure they are fully compatible with the print heads and printing systems. They are filtered to three micron absolute, so there are no head blockages and, in most cases, there is no need to flush the heads when swapping from the original equipment manufacturers’ inks. Therefore printers converting to Streamline inks get equal or better performance with additional benefits such as economy and quality, as well as the supply security you would expect from a long-term partner and solutions provider.
“Current trends suggest that the digital market will continue to grow by around 10 per cent per annum for the foreseeable future. As technology progresses, digital printers will be capable of printing on more applications and the economic viability will increase. The growing Far East economies are also seeing significant growth in their local markets, which will cause the region’s global market share to increase. However, because digital printing is often short-run and fast turnaround, the growth in Asia is not expected to take significant value or volume out of Europe and North America, where local service is still necessary.”
Getting environmental
Another fast growing trend, as far as ink manufacturers are concerned, is going green. This isn’t new by any stretch of the imagination, as we have been trying to improve the environmental status of the industry for some time, but it is good to see that companies are now really making an effort to change.
The first EPA-recognised environmentally friendly solvent ink is therefore a revolutionary development for superwide format printing and another in a series of green initiatives from EFI. BioVu is part of the company’s long-held commitment to improving the environment and benefiting its global customers.
EFI’s CEO, Guy Gecht, said: “Unlike many new products, which are step change improvements, BioVu ink is a revolutionary advancement that will improve not only our customers’ environmental footprint, but also their bottom lines. It represents our commitment to protecting an increasingly fragile earth, one we hope others in the industry will follow.”
Vice president and general manager of EFI’s Ink Division, Scott Schinlever, said: “We have been testing the inks in the US and Europe for nearly a year, with the final formulation now in the field. The results have exceeded expectations, and we are very excited about making this unique ink commercially available to the superwide format industry.”
BioVu is the first solvent-based ink made from a renewable resource (derived from corn), and the only ink recognised by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), thereby establishing an entirely new category of truly environmentally friendly inks. The ink is made from food-grade ingredients yet designed to deliver the benefits of traditional solvent inks without the compromises inherent in eco-solvent and aqueous inks. This includes the same colour gamut as traditional solvent inks, so users can seamlessly switch to these environmentally conscious inks with no workflow or prepress process modifications.
Like other solvent-based inks, BioVu is formulated to provide durability, strong bonding to uncoated surfaces and resistance to UV light and mechanical wear. However, unlike other solvent inks on the market, BioVu is specifically designed to run in high-production environments. Although water-based inks are also environmentally friendly, they have significant limitations in terms of their application potential. Also, other solvent-based inks positioned as environmentally friendly still offer poor health and environmental profiles and contain volatile organic compounds (VOCs) with hazardous air pollutants (HAPs), a component deemed by the US EPA to have a particularly poor toxicological profile when released to the environment through evaporation.
Schinlever continued: “Each year, commercial formulators use millions of pounds of chemical ingredients that one way or another find their way into the environment. Our customers have made it clear that they want the ability to print superwide graphics without bothersome fumes or expensive ventilation systems. Our environmentally friendly BioVu ink, made from renewable resources, is the only ink that effectively addresses these concerns.”
Need for speed
One industry trend which we are all familiar with is the need to print better and faster. Industrial inkjet printers can print hundreds of square metres per hour, but expanding markets for colourful, high-quality, and durable point-of-purchase, outdoor displays, and vehicle and building graphics are pushing productivity needs to even higher levels. Because printheads and inks are key components of any inkjet system, higher productivity may ultimately depend on printhead and ink technologies that offer reliable performance and high image quality at high print speeds.
Higher productivity means printing more square metres per hour, and this requires delivering ink more rapidly to the print medium. Higher ink flows can be accomplished in a number of ways including: higher drop ejection rates; larger drop volumes; printing wider swaths; making fewer printhead passes; and using faster-drying inks. These strategies can be employed in combination or separately, but, in general, every practical solution involves adding more nozzles per colour and places increased demands on printhead performance.
HP Scitex’s X2 printhead is designed to answer this need for speed and productivity. It’s compact, modular design is based on an innovative silicon and glass printhead chip designed, developed and manufactured by HP.
Manufacturing processes using silicon-based MEMS technologies allow the design and production of high performance drop generator architectures designed to ensure consistent drop ejection performance.
The printhead chip has 128 nozzles with a native resolution of 100 nozzles/inch. It can be assembled into multi-printhead modules offering resolutions up to 800dpi. With each nozzle ejecting up to 30,000 drops per second (with drop volumes up to 50pl) the X2 printhead can deliver over 10 millilitres of ink per minute at linear print speeds up to 2m/s.
Better printheads are just one of the ways in which manufacturers are answering our requests for greater speed and productivity but it is one industry trend which we will definitely hear more about as this type of technology will only continue to improve.
And finally
In every market it is the trends which keep the industry alive and this industry is no different. This is one reason why it is always good to see new trends because this means the market is responding to customer demand with new products and services.
It also means that we are forging ahead with innovation and continue to push the digital industry forward with bigger and better technical advances.
So next time you hear someone say it’s just a fad, bear in mind these trends will form the basic structure of the industry and we must embrace them to move forward.
