The World Wide Survey

Add a Comment

15 Comments

Comment by Emile Vos on September 16, 2009 at 7:18am

Could somebody advise what determines the cohesion between (eco-)solvent inks and the media and how to incease cohesion.

Comment by Nagy Roshdy Iskandar Abdelmaseh on June 13, 2009 at 11:02pm

Comment by Luminita Magnusson on April 1, 2009 at 5:12pm

I look forward to FESPA 2009. ....se you there ...I hope :-)

Comment by Eva Kokkori on April 1, 2009 at 3:30pm

Thank you very much for the info. No I wasn't aware of the alternative and to be honest I am not sure if I have ever encountered SepiaX... Still I will look into it. We might meet them at Fespa...

Comment by Jochen Christiaens on April 1, 2009 at 2:12pm

Dear Eva,
an alternative to the HP solution exists also. It is in no way comparable with the HP package approach, however an alternative on technology base. I don't know if you heard about the austrian company SepiaX, who developed an ink similar to the "Latex". It is working on several media (not predefined manufacturers and typical media used in outdoor and indoor LFP inkjet applications). It was made for EPSON print head based printers, I suppose their first tests were done on Roland printer. The print quality was good, compared to the standard Roland ink. It certainly delivers the required quality, however print speeds and other parameters need to be checked for your applicaion or printing environment.I can assume slow prints for a high speed production environment will not make you happy on the long run.
Hope this information has also helped you a little.
Greetings
Jochen

Comment by Eva Kokkori on March 12, 2009 at 12:35pm

After so many days with no replies... here comes Rainer!

Thank you so much for the great input. Of course you have helped me. I know that there are printer houses who have already purchased the machine, that's why I was hoping to get some opinions from end-users too. Nevertheless, you are a significant source of information!
Thank you again!
Eva

Comment by Rainer Schloesser on March 12, 2009 at 8:32am

Eva, I´d like to comment on your question reagarding the new HP 65500 printer. I only can do this from a material supplier point of view (for the one how don´t know me – I´m working for 3M).

We were in the fortune situation, that HP approached us during their product development phase to join their “HP Latex Developers Program”. With this we were able to get access to a printer and test the printers compatibility with our products. As a result of this work, we have a number of products qualified for the HP65500 printer and printer profiles available.

What is our experience with the machine? I think HP is making a truly step into offering a printer that addresses the subject of “green” / “sustainability”. The main reason is certainly the ink (which is latex based – which means that a main component is water). If you are interested about more details of the technology – go to: www.hp.com/go/hp_latex_printing_technologies).

My experience is, that the latex based ink is combining the benefits of UV and solvent inks – but without containing monomers or solvents (main component is water).
This means: prints well on mesh, banner, vinyl,… - no coated material required – good drying characteristic – scratch resistant (after a few days … not necessarily straight after printing) – no odder – little to none impact of the ink to the adhesive performance (like you see sometimes with high solvent content ink)

About the hardware: The printer comes with a PC as a controller. From this PC, lots of functions like managing media profiles, print queue management, linearization and ink-restriction is controlled from. Each media needs to be calibrated once to generate a media –profile. This means, the printer is linearising itself. So if you have more of those printers and install the once generated media-profile on all of them – the output (should) be the same. On the other side – this linearization can not be bypassed by the RIP and therefore any linearization by the RIP will be overwriten.

From a performance / speed point of view - I think it is as with every printer in the market. Main setting is the number of passes you use to print. Less passes – faster printing. Different kind of materials will need different number of passes to get to an acceptable quality. To many passes might cause the system not being able to dry the image anymore sufficient.
Our experience is, that with self-adhesive vinyls 6 to 8 passes is a good setting.

How to find out more ? One thing I will do to learn more about this printer is to visit a customer in a month time. HP started to ship printers out and the population is growing.

Again, in my opinion, this is a very interesting step from HP towards a technology for more environmental printing. I would assume, that this is a first step from HP and there will be more printer models follow based on the same technology.
Still – the printer / ink is one component in a long chain of items to get to a graphic. 3M has a range of non-PVC based self-adhesive films which we keep testing on this printer.

Hope you´ll find these comments helpful and it motivates others to post their thoughts as well.

Rainer

Comment by Eva Kokkori on February 25, 2009 at 11:11am

Hello everybody! Hope you are all doing well!
Since this group is about new trends and challenges, may I ask if someone knows about the new latex inks (environmental friendly) that HP has introduced for large format printers? Have you heard if there is another organization, competitor to HP, introducing similar technologies/machines?

Comment by Casteels Martine on February 25, 2009 at 9:37am

Having a good view on how you can expand yr business with new applications to existing and new customers is key - also understanding the business model: What are you selling ? A print on a substrate or something with a 'different' value attached to it.

Comment by Mike Horsten on February 13, 2009 at 4:02pm

Let rock and roll in this group.
As an Gandi Owner i can help anyone with DS problems

• 1
• 2