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By delivering 2400 nozzles per inch and providing support for dual drop weight per color, HP’s new printheads featuring High Definition Nozzle Architecture (HDNA) represent a breakthrough in the print quality and performance of inkjet web presses. of penetration of inkjet and digital printing into labels. Ceramics has been massive in that respect, like wide-format graphics.” New inkjet head developments are enabling new applications, some of which are still some time away from large-scale implementation and adoption by commercial printers who, after all, are still getting their heads around production inkjet printing on paper. But these new applications can be integrated with materials that printers are already running. Take a printer who is doing documents for an insurance company— new policies, welcome packets, and so on. They’re making money by pumping high-volumes of documents through their presses. “We have customers running on average 11 to 12 million A4 impressions a month on the 5000,” said Promis. “But they might have a plastics line that’s doing similar volume and need a unique or specialized head. We have some customers that want to do insurance cards on polymerized teslin types of media.” Still one head—and thus one press—will not be flexible enough to handle all the kinds of things a company may want to put through it. For printing on flexible packaging and plastics, you’re more likely going to want to use a UV-curable ink to ensure basic adhesion, but a printhead—and a press—that prints with UV ink would not be suitable for document printing; the ink cost would be prohibitive. So inkjet presses are flexible, but only up to a point, at least for the time being. “We have customers constantly asking us, ‘in the future can we do corrugated?’” said Promis. “The quick and dirty answer is, ‘probably not, based on what we sold you,’ but over time, inks and heads will have that ability.” Other mechanical aspects of the press may need to be altered, like the transport mechanism, but, said Promis, “that versatility and flexibility are what everyone is looking for.” It’s tempting to blue-sky the ability to print on all these new non-paper substrates, but printhead developments are also expanding the range of good-old-fashioned inkon paper applications. HP’s HDNA printheads and dual drop weight technology enable a smoother gradation from shadows to midtones to highlights, which is especially noticeable in fleshtones and other high-end graphics, such as photos of automobiles, fine jewelry, and other luxury items that require precise dot placement and smooth tonality without grain. “When you have this enhanced tonality, smoothness, and the ability to have greater addressability within the color gamut, the quality just looks better and you have more jobs that can be migrated to inkjet from offset,” said Murphy. “We see this opening up a variety of commercial applications that might just be out of reach of many printers today.” Applications like marketing collateral, data sheets, business ID, or anything that might require high-quality photos. “It also opens up more applications within publishing,” he said. “Magazine onserts and inserts, even some custom magazines, catalogs, and magalogs.” Looking to the future and all sorts of new applications and capabilities is all well and good, but what about today? Obviously, when a printer is evaluating an inkjet printing system, the printheads are an important element of the overall printing ecosystem. The suitability of any particular system will still predominantly be a function of what a particular OEM has done with the printheads. “I liken it to the whole camera megapixel issue,” said Folkins of Xerox. “Everyone is hyped up on how many megapixels. I have a 5-megapixel Nikon camera that takes 10,000 times better photos than my cellphone that has 10 megapixels. There are so many aspects that make for a good printer, you’ve got to rely on the machine designer to put it together.” Indeed, it’s the rest of the press— the “context” of the printheads— that will provide most of the foliage on the decision tree. But is there anything about the printheads themselves that printers should be cognizant of? Folkins cites basic “spec sheet” attributes like resolution, speed, and price—the more dots per inch (although that number isn’t always comparable from machine to machine), the faster those dots are spit out, and the cheaper it all is, are all advantages when evaluating print engines. But it will come down to Continued on page 23 16 Inkjet’s Age | June 2015 MyPRINTResource.com


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