Eminence Business Media

Eminence Business Media

Tuesday, October 12, 2010

DOMINO DEMONSTRATED THE POWER OF DIGITAL PRINT AT LABELEXPO AMERICAS

Making its North American debut at Labelexpo Americas was the Domino K600 high resolution single color piezo ink jet system. The latest addition to the successful K-Series line-up, the 600dpi K600 satisfies the growing market requirement to digitally print complete products. Print widths range from 108mm (4.25”) to 780mm (30.8”), with scalability being achieved by mounting print modules across a bar.

The K600 joins a range which includes the K100, K150 and K200 variants. These are available with UV curable and low volatile solvent inks and have been successfully deployed in a variety of applications since their 2005 introduction, such that the range now accounts for an estimated 30% worldwide market share in its target markets.

The K-Series’ variable data printing capability supports barcodes, 2D codes including QR Codes, numbers, graphics, logos and personalized data in a range of different image sizes. The capability to accommodate different print widths by stitching heads across the web is key to the K-Series’ appeal. The existing stitchable K200 provides up to 244mm (9.6”) single image area. The new K600 provides double the print resolution, grayscale capability and is suitable both for narrow web as well as wider format sheet and web applications.

David Ellen, Senior Vice-President, Digital Printing Solutions at Domino North America, says, “Installations of the K-Series have been increasingly weighted towards multiple printer installations, indicating a general market requirement to print high quality variable data across full web widths. The K600 responds to this need, offering a native print resolution of 600dpi with three or four grayscales (nominal 1200dpi) and line speeds of 75 to 150 meters/min (246 to 492 ft/min)

“The new K600 offers a flexible single-color solution for part-personalization through to full sheet or web printing, delivering a quality indistinguishable from that of pre-print at double the speed of most comparable systems,” he continues.

Typical web applications for the K600 include digitally printing single color language variants for short run production, helping to reduce complexity, changeover time and inventory requirements compared to conventional flexo solutions, while in the sheetfed arena, the system is ideally-suited to sheet-to-sheet game card and security printing applications. In common with all K-Series models, the K600 has a compact modular design to facilitate integration with a range of host machines and is available with both aqueous and UV curable ink options.

“Alternative binary technology, although high speed, cannot match the simplicity of the K600 piezo-based technology or indeed get close to the print quality,” continues Ellen. “For applications including direct mail, forms and tickets, we believe this product will be seen as a significant advancement.”

At Labelexpo Americas 2010 Domino also showed a 333mm (13.1”) K600 UV printing solution integrated on a Grafisk Maskinfabrik DC330 mini converter.

Headquartered in Cambridge, UK, Domino has a global reputation for the development and manufacture of coding, marking and printing technologies that satisfy the requirements of manufacturers and commercial printers. Services for the commercial print sector encompass the design and manufacture of  binary, continuous and drop on demand ink jet print solutions, to apply variable and serialized data within a wide range of markets, including the finishing/bindery, newspaper and magazines, tickets, tags and labels, business forms, plastic cards, gaming/lottery and direct mail & postal sectors.