Head Games: Inkjet Printheads Are Rapidly Evolving By Richard Romano Ricoh’s latest generation of inkjet head is the Ricoh Pro VC60000, Iwith which the t’s probably safe to say that the vast majority of us company has know that the engine is important to the overall performance sought to improve of a car. When we are car shopping, though, automation, yield, very few of us are likely to pop the hood and poke and volumes. around underneath, hardcore gearheads notwithstanding. The relevant information is conveyed by the sticker and the salesperson, and besides, how many of us would have the slightest idea what we were looking at anyway? The same is generally true when print providers are evaluating print engines. Few are well-versed in the nuances of printhead design and other aspects of the marking engine, so they rely on the spec sheet and/or a salesperson to provide the relevant facts. And just as when we look at the specs of a car, like estimates of mileage, we know what figures to take with a grain of salt. Too detailed a discussion of inkjet printheads can be a bit “Inside Baseball,” but new printhead developments are enabling new applications and productivity improvements. And while most people shopping for a production inkjet system are not likely to ask for a brand of printheads by name, it pays to know “enough to be dangerous.” “They don’t need to get into the geometry of the nozzle plates,” said George Promis, VP of Production Ink Jet Solutions & Business Development for Ricoh, “but they need to know: are they going to work in their environment and are they going to be able to maintain, clean, and replace them?” Ricoh has long been a manufacturer of printheads for its own production inkjet solutions, as well as for other OEMs in a wide variety of industries, including commercial printing. “Most printhead attributes are invisible to the customer,” said Jeff Folkins, Research Fellow at Xerox Corp., which uses a mix of third-party and internally developed printheads in its production inkjet offerings. “The conversation with the customer is very different than the conversation with the machine designer.” The print service provider needs to ask, “What is this technology going to mean for me today, what is it going to mean for me in two years, three years, five, seven, 12 years?” said David Murphy, Worldwide Director of Marketing & Business Development for HP Inkjet Web Press Solutions. “The last thing any print service provider wants to hear after he or she invested one-and-a-half to six million dollars in a press is that somebody else comes out with something at drupa 2016 that makes their investment obsolete.” HP has announced a new printhead architecture called High Definition Nozzle Architecture (HDNA) that doubles Xerox’s CiPress printheads are used in the CiPress 325 and 500 Production Inkjet System, unique in the inkjet market as they are a type of waterless inkjet based on Xerox’s “solid ink” printing. the number of nozzles per inch (npi, which is not a unit of measurement we come across very often) from 1200 npi to 2400 npi. The HDNA printheads use what HP calls “dual drop weight,” which means that half of the 2400 nozzles jet the same droplet size, while the other half jet droplets that are less than half that size (HP is still tweaking the technology so hasn’t settled on a final droplet size as of this writing). The HDNA printheads, which are headed to a beta site later this year and will be available starting in 2016, will be a field upgrade to all HP inkjet presses installed since 2009. “When we introduce a new technology, it’s going to be field upgradable to offer a customer the ability to bring their press to the state of the art without having to upgrade their whole press.” The inkjet—and inkjet printhead—market is taking off and has been for the past decade or so. Production printing is really only a small sliver of the entirety of the inkjet market, and there are a bewildering variety of new and emerging industrial printing applications, such as printing imitation leather on automotive dashboards, textures on floor tiles and laminates, solar panels, and a whole growing field of medical inkjet imaging. But these 14 Inkjet’s Age | June 2015 MyPRINTResource.com
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