Screen Printing - December 2017/January 2018 - 32
special issue: InnovatIon
When Single
PaSS Took
FlighT
Though it has become the talk of the industry
only fairly recently, single-pass inkjet printing goes
back 20 years to a system that demonstrated the
enormous potential of the technology.
Steve Duccilli, ASDPt
Y
ou can sum up the pioneer era of inkjet with a twist on a
cliché: (lack of) speed kills. The earliest inkjet units marketed for graphic-arts applications in the early '90s weren't really
industrial machinery at all, accomplishing in an hour what
could be done in seconds on a conventional press. Even accounting for prepress and setup savings, only the shortest run
lengths could justifiably be done. And the biggest disconnect
for potential buyers: the printhead carriages that traversed
back and forth across the substrate, one painstaking row at a
time, instead of imaging the full width of the sheet at once as
analog presses did.
Continuous inkjet technology was already being used for
single-pass coding and marking, but its potential for graphicarts applications was minimal. By '96, hints of parallel dropon-demand piezo inkjet technology began to appear with new
machine configurations that used full-width arrays instead of
traversing printheads. First came the Idanit-162 Ad, with an
unusual drum-based design that could image 5 x 8-foot sheets
of vinyl and other flexible stocks for applications such as
fleet markings. That same year, Tektronix unveiled the Phaser
600, a 48-inch rollfed printer designed for promotional graphics that used solid wax inks.
But the breakthrough of a true full-color, single-pass print
32
screenprinting
engine using drop-on-demand heads was still four years away.
And it would come from a familiar name that was not yet associated with printer manufacturing.
a Wrench in The SYSTem
The Belgian company Barco Graphics was known for its highquality film imagesetters as well software and other prepress
solutions. In the early '90s, Barco developed a digital front
end called PrintStreamer for electrostatic print engines, which
then had more market traction in specialty printing than inkjet
and other digital technologies.
"I saw the potential of PrintStreamer, but also the shortcomings of dry-toner digital printing for the markets we were
serving," says Rob Haak, who managed Barco's digital printing
division. "We started to study piezo drop-on-demand technology, and decided to move forward with plans to build a singlepass, full-color inkjet system using UV inks for the markets
we knew and had already served. We knew how to feed and
master the data streams for full-speed digital presses, so it
was a logical step for us."
In April of '98, Haak approved plans to develop a singlepass, roll-to-roll system tentatively named Ramses that could
be adapted for a variety of industrial applications. Among
Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Screen Printing - December 2017/January 2018
Contents
Screen Printing - December 2017/January 2018 - Cover1
Screen Printing - December 2017/January 2018 - Cover2
Screen Printing - December 2017/January 2018 - 1
Screen Printing - December 2017/January 2018 - Contents
Screen Printing - December 2017/January 2018 - 3
Screen Printing - December 2017/January 2018 - 4
Screen Printing - December 2017/January 2018 - 5
Screen Printing - December 2017/January 2018 - 6
Screen Printing - December 2017/January 2018 - 7
Screen Printing - December 2017/January 2018 - 8
Screen Printing - December 2017/January 2018 - 9
Screen Printing - December 2017/January 2018 - 10
Screen Printing - December 2017/January 2018 - 11
Screen Printing - December 2017/January 2018 - 12
Screen Printing - December 2017/January 2018 - 13
Screen Printing - December 2017/January 2018 - 14
Screen Printing - December 2017/January 2018 - 15
Screen Printing - December 2017/January 2018 - 16
Screen Printing - December 2017/January 2018 - 17
Screen Printing - December 2017/January 2018 - 18
Screen Printing - December 2017/January 2018 - 19
Screen Printing - December 2017/January 2018 - 20
Screen Printing - December 2017/January 2018 - 21
Screen Printing - December 2017/January 2018 - 22
Screen Printing - December 2017/January 2018 - 23
Screen Printing - December 2017/January 2018 - 24
Screen Printing - December 2017/January 2018 - 25
Screen Printing - December 2017/January 2018 - 26
Screen Printing - December 2017/January 2018 - 27
Screen Printing - December 2017/January 2018 - 28
Screen Printing - December 2017/January 2018 - 29
Screen Printing - December 2017/January 2018 - 30
Screen Printing - December 2017/January 2018 - 31
Screen Printing - December 2017/January 2018 - 32
Screen Printing - December 2017/January 2018 - 33
Screen Printing - December 2017/January 2018 - 34
Screen Printing - December 2017/January 2018 - 35
Screen Printing - December 2017/January 2018 - 36
Screen Printing - December 2017/January 2018 - 37
Screen Printing - December 2017/January 2018 - 38
Screen Printing - December 2017/January 2018 - 39
Screen Printing - December 2017/January 2018 - 40
Screen Printing - December 2017/January 2018 - Cover3
Screen Printing - December 2017/January 2018 - Cover4
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