Screen Printing - December 2017/January 2018 - 34

special issue: InnovatIon

jobs, on all kind of materials," he says. "We were really being
evangelists for inkjet, as we had to prove the short-run printing
advantages and break-even point with different conventional
printing technologies (screen, flexo, gravure, and offset), over
and over again. And imagine: We were talking about UV inks
that were priced at 150 euros per liter!"
Two more field units were placed at display graphics
facilities, including the first North American installation at
RockTenn Merchandising Displays (now WestRock), which
used the.factory to print P-O-P displays and cash wraps. Tom
Cooper, R&D manager of digital printing for WestRock, faced
similar obstacles as Barco in conveying the benefits of the
new technology to customers. He remembers one cosmetics
company in particular where the buyer felt that the high gloss
of the UV ink cheapened the brand's image. "The next thing
you knew, all these other people around the table were nodding and saying, 'Oh, yes, I agree - it does cheapen our image.'
"Later, we did a demonstration with that same group of
people. We showed them two displays. One was offset and
the other was from the Dotrix. We said, 'You tell us which one
is offset and which one is Dotrix.' And they all thought the
Dotrix was the offset print."
Momentum appeared to be building. The company
announced an OEM relationship with flexo press manufacturer
Mark Andy and placed additional units in more typical commercial applications. Meanwhile, as Haak notes, the buzz about
single-pass printing was beginning to spread beyond Dotrix. The
Spanish companies Cretaprint (purchased by EFI in 2012) and
Kerajet were using single-pass print engines to decorate ceramic
tiles. Other technology developers including Aprion Digital and
Memjet began making announcements leading up to drupa 2004.
Then, shortly before the show, Agfa purchased Dotrix
from Barco for a reported 6 million euros. "We felt we had
overcome the difficult integration issues for several markets and were sure to take advantage of the power of Agfa's
worldwide distribution," says Haak, who left to form an inkjet
consultancy the following year. "However, Dotrix ended up
in 'parking' mode and lost valuable time to market." Among
other revisions, Agfa changed the printheads and inks, and in
2009 launched a redesigned version called the Dotrix Modular,
ultimately discontinuing the brand in 2012.

The fuTure is now
In hindsight, it's striking how far ahead of its time the Dotrix
was. There would be other stepping stones in the slow progression of single-pass technology. Inca, for example, pursued
the corrugated board market in the late 2000s with the FastJet, while companies such as Fuji and Xerox began showing
early single-pass systems for labels and commercial applications around 2008. The flurry of major single-pass technology
demonstrations at drupa and ITMA in 2015 in applications
ranging from textile printing to corrugated board manufacturing underscore that the potential of the technology may soon
be fully realized.
34

screenprinting

A closeup of the original SpiCE engine, using two Xaar 500S printheads, completed just days before its unveiling at drupa 2000. Barco
switched to toshiba grayscale heads by the formal launch.

But even with the intense expectations surrounding the
single pass today, ceramic tile printing is the only sector
where it has achieved market dominance so far. Haak points
to technologies that needed to catch up with the concept. Inks
with better viscosities and jetting behavior were needed for
extremely high-speed printing, for example. He also cites the
breakthrough of printheads with ink recirculation architecture
at the nozzle plates, which emerged five years ago.
Cooper notes that as the resolution and speed of singlepass technology have increased, so has the challenge of
managing data, going far beyond RIP processing to how
information flows through the entire plant. With no
makeready time, for example, the pressure on job staging
becomes enormous. "You have to keep those machines fed,"
he says. "They're basically white sharks chewing the files up.
Machines are getting faster; printhead technology is maturing. But it really gets down to information management and
reducing the number of touches that people have."
Eve remains optimistic about single pass, but believes that
each application presents a different challenge and adoption
curve. He points out that it's not unusual for technologies to
appear many years before they gain widespread acceptance,
drawing a parallel with digital cameras, which were available
long before the inevitable replacement of silver-halide film.
"When industries do start taking in a new technology, it often
moves quicker than people were expecting," he says. "There's
often a very long lead-in where not much seems to be happening,
and then in quite a small number of years, things flip."
Cooper is also bullish, noting that WestRock's Dotrix
Modular press is still in operation today. "That machine
spawned a lot of other designs as you look at the systems in
the label industry and some of the others that are out there
today," he says. "It gave us a really strong foreshadowing to
what's coming. Single pass is the future; there is no question
about it."

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Screen Printing - December 2017/January 2018