Wide Format Printing Provides Big Opportunities WBy Richard Romano ide format printing continues to be a dynamic area of interest to general commercial printers looking to expand their product and service offerings. Show areas such as the Inkjet Candy Store (Booth 3040) are a good place to start, but equipment manufacturers such as EFI (Booth 1902), Mimaki (Booth 2644), Mutoh (Booth 4241), HP (1202), Roland (Booth 4253), Epson (Booth 841), Canon USA (Booth 1213), and others can offer guidance for the business trying to get a foothold in this new environment. The equipment has been evolving in line with changes in demand from customers. Flatbed machines are coming down in price, and UV LED—which uses cooler and more energy efficient inks that cure under LEDs rather than traditional mercury-vapor lamps—is becoming an affordable option which can help shops save on energy costs. EFI has committed itself to LED curing technology throughout its portfolio, and Mimaki and others have added LED curing units to their lineups. HP has become the poster child, as it were, for latex, but Mimaki also has latex ink-based machines, which are suited for a wide range of applications, with textiles like soft signage a top application for this technology. Textile printing in all its myriad forms is one of the hottest wide format/specialty printing applications today, and dye-sublimation based machines are more appropriate than latex for outdoor soft signage applications or apparel. Speaking of latex, making its U.S. debut at GRAPH EXPO 15 is the six-color, 126" HP Latex 3500, designed to handle high-volume applications. Also on display in HP’s booth is the HP PageWide XL 8000 printer. Announced last spring, this is HP’s entry in the single-pass wide format market, and is said to offer high-end production printing at speeds up to 30 D/A1-size prints per minute. “PSPs with standardized workflows are stretching existing equipment to meet client demand and are looking to expand their printing fleets to better react to complex print jobs and demand for shorter lead times,” says Oriol Gasch, Category Director, Americas Large Format Printing, HP. “HP is addressing these challenges across a variety of wide-format applications with the 126" HP Latex 3500 Printer, enabling PSPs to fulfill even the most demanding high-volume sign and display print jobs, and the HP PageWide XL Printer portfolio, allowing reprographers to redefine productivity, printing costs, and quality.” Looking at productivity, earlier this year, Canon launched the Océ ColorWave 700, a toner-based 42" printing system designed for customers looking to print a wide range of color graphics, as well as CAD/GIS applications. It features the new Océ MediaSense, a technology that allows printing on media up to 32-mil thick. Top applications for the ColorWave 700 are banners, canvas, wrapping paper, custom wallpaper, and more. In the flatbed UV arena, Canon USA is also showing the most recent entries in the Océ Arizona 6100 Series, which launched last year. These are the six-color Océ Arizona 6160 XTS and seven-color Océ Arizona 6170 XTS. Like many of its brethren, the Arizonas are capable of printing on a wide range of rigid media applications, as well as multi-layer and double-sided prints. Commercial Printing | Digital Printing | Flexible Packaging Folding Carton Packaging | Metal Decorating | Newspaper Plastic Cards | Security Printing | Signage and POP www.kba.com KBA covers it all... Booth 213 HP Latex 3500 Canon will also be playing off a recent email campaign that launched in August that aimed to shed light on how to measure real productivity with wide-format printers. “Many manufacturers will claim some unrealistic squarefoot per-hour top speed on a spec sheet,” says Randy Paar, Marketing Manager of Display Graphics for Canon Solutions America. “This sounds really impressive, but it too often produces an unsellable result and the operator is then forced to slow the printer down—sometimes to one-half or one-quarter of the quoted top speed.” Canon’s email campaign featured a video of the Arizona 6170 achieving 33 boards per hour, confirmed by featuring a Canon Solutions-branded stopwatch in the video. As part of the campaign, says Paar, “people were able to register to receive their own Canon Solutions stopwatch and, ideally, go time some competitive machines. We have some stopwatches available at the GRAPH EXPO 15 show.” Armed with time, as well as ample enthusiasm and curiosity, it should be no trouble to uncover worlds of opportunity in wide format and other types of specialty printing. 28 September 14, 2015 | GRAPH EXPO Official Show Daily | PrintingNews.com
GraphExpo Show Daily September 14 2015
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