Canon is planning to make use of its upcoming Canon Expo in Yokohama, Japan in October to point out off two new inkjet presses: a brand new label press, the LabelStream LS2000; and a manufacturing printer, the VarioPrint iX1700.
These two presses mark a brand new chapter for Canon. Its present inkjet manufacturing printers in addition to the LS4000 inkjet label press all use piezo drop-on-demand printheads, which is by far the dominant head expertise in most business and industrial print programs. However these new fashions use thermal printheads. Canon says that that is suited to the goal market segments.
However as knowledgeable cynic, it appears to me way more seemingly that Canon is solely adopting the identical method that HP has already fairly overtly taken. Each firms personal important core IP round thermal printheads, having every independently designed and patented thermal printhead expertise at roughly the identical time. And each firms have cross-licensed a few of their patents regarding thermal printheads. So there’s good business sense in utilizing the printhead IP that Canon already owns or has entry – to create business and industrial print options, which ought to result in increased revenue margins than shopping for in piezo printheads. Actually, the query is, why didn’t Canon do that earlier than?
The problem in fact is to develop the thermal printheads to be strong sufficient to face up to industrial use. Thermal heads typically have a comparatively brief life and are thought to be consumable objects. Nevertheless, each HP and Memjet have managed to lengthen the working lifetime of their thermal heads in recent times. Jennifer Kolloczek, senior director of selling for digital manufacturing printing, says that it’s too early within the improvement cycle for Canon to touch upon this.
LabelStream LS2000
This brings us to the presses themselves. The LabelStream LS2000 expands Canon’s footprint on this market however whereas the prevailing LS4000 is a UV hybrid printer, the brand new machine is a standalone roll-to-roll digital press that makes use of water-based inks. I consider that quite a few distributors are working to develop label presses with water-based inks however Canon is amongst the primary to overtly say so. (Bobst has beforehand demonstrated a prototype however remains to be engaged on this, and Epson’s L4000 sequence makes use of a number of passes and runs at 8 meters per minute, whereas Memjet was notably absent from this 12 months’s Label Expo.)
Canon says that it has developed a brand new printhead for this press that’s able to printing at 2400 x 1200 dpi decision, which places it on par with the thermal heads utilized in Canon’s ProGraf huge format printers. The top options recirculation as Hans Schmidbauer, director of selling for Canon Europe, explains, “The brand new printheads function an ink circulation mechanism that ensures there’s a steady flotation throughout the ink so the chamber of the ink, that’s being heated and the ink droplet is being formulated, is repeatedly fed with recent ink with the intention to hold the viscosity on a relentless degree and to make sure the lifetime and in addition the proper picture high quality via the identical droplet dimension all through the manufacturing run. In order that ink circulation mechanism is exclusive now to that new printhead.” That ought to go some approach to making certain an affordable lifespan for the heads.
Canon’s method is to first jet a water-based primer, which it calls a conditioning liquid, the place the droplets land within the precise spot the place the ink will comply with. The conditioning liquid helps to carry the pigments onto the completely different substrates, which Canon says will permit it to breed a large shade gamut. That stated, Canon has not but been in a position to outline what the colour gamut is.
That is adopted by the ink, which is claimed to be a high-density, water-based polymer ink that has been developed particularly for the brand new printhead. The ink is claimed to include extremely saturated pigments. Canon says that the ink kinds a really skinny layer on the substrate that reduces the scattering of sunshine for higher shade copy.
The press itself takes substrates as much as 340 mm huge. The usual mannequin prints 5 colours – CMYK plus white – although it appears to me as if there’s room for extra colours to be added later. The white ink is claimed to be round 70% opacity, which is pretty customary.
The press shouldn’t be significantly quick, working at 40 meters per minute, and this pace halves when printing white ink. Then once more, the primary era of water-based label printers is more likely to be slower than present UV label printers due to the extra drying required to take away the water from the ink. Maybe not surprisingly, Kolloczek declined to disclose particulars on the drying system at this stage.
Edoardo Cotichini, senior supervisor for label and packaging for Canon Europe, says that one of many causes behind selecting water-based inks is to adjust to meals security requirements, including, “The inks are designed to be compliant and certifications are pending.”
The press is focused on the mid-volume label changing market, which Cotichini defines as 100 to 200,000 linear meters a month, noting, “That is the candy spot the place we plan to place it.” He continues, “We see that the volumes within the label business continue to grow however the precise lengths of those volumes have gotten smaller which is driving digitalization.” He provides that there’s a normal lack of abilities and that digital presses will help with this, declaring that Canon has automated the upkeep and high quality management in addition to the colour administration. He says, “We have now automated programs that not solely help you do a linearization and calibration robotically however we will even be capable to generate shade profiles with a easy click on in order that with none nice experience operators can even deal with this facet.”
Canon will proceed to promote its current LS4000, which is predicated on the Graphium UV inkjet press developed by FFEI and Edale, and is focused at increased volumes. Kolloczek says that Canon has efficiently put in a number of LS4000 presses in Western Europe however received’t say what number of, which in fact most journalists will assume to imply not very many.
Surprisingly sufficient, Kolloczek says that Canon has not used any enter from Edale, the British label press producer that it acquired final 12 months. The transport system in a label press is essential to deal with the net pressure for the big variety of label shares which might be generally used. Nevertheless, the picture of the LS2000 appears rather more as if it’s primarily been designed to have an extended drying tunnel, following Canon’s expertise of utilizing water-based inks with its ProStream sequence of single-pass web-fed presses.
VarioPrint ix1700
The second of those new presses is the VarioPrint iX1700, a sheetfed B3 inkjet manufacturing press that builds on Canon’s current portfolio of such units. This additionally makes use of a newly designed thermal head producing the identical 2400 x 1200 dpi decision although on this case the pinnacle spans the complete width of the B3 sheet. Naturally, it makes use of the identical method of first jetting the conditioning liquid, adopted by the colours, which on this case are CMYK.
This Canon VarioPrint ix1700 is the corporate’s first manufacturing printer to make use of thermal printheads.
The press is focused at business print and in-house print segments and can work with customary uncoated and offset-coated paper. It produces 73 B3 photographs per minute or round 170 A4 ppm. The press does auto-duplexing on the identical pace. As such it’s being positioned as a crossover system, between the ImagePress toner presses and the sooner inkjets, which use Kyocera piezo heads and might produce as much as 320 A4 ppm. It’s barely smaller than the prevailing VarioPrint presses at round 8.5 meters lengthy and can include Canon’s PrismaSync DFE. Kollocek says that there’s demand for a press that’s cheaper or extra compact than the prevailing VarioPrint fashions.
The apparent query is whether or not or not Canon can also be planning to exchange the sooner inkjet presses with new fashions with thermal heads. Kollocek says, “At this time limit, we strongly really feel that the newly developed printhead is the most effective match for the setting that the ix1700 goes to play in, whereas the present piezo heads fulfill the wants of the upper quantity business environments.” Nevertheless, HP has already confirmed that thermal printheads can deal with the calls for of high-speed presses.
Kolloceck says that Canon will proceed to develop toner presses, noting, “It’s absolutely clear to us that electrophotographic and toner volumes are comparatively steady and so they do have a spot out there and we see that additionally within the demand for our present ImagePress traces. And fairly often you see double installations with a sheetfed inkjet press and a toner sheetfed press subsequent to them to cowl the entire breadth of purposes that somebody could must print as a result of a toner press should have a bonus over inkjet in sure specialty media.”
In conclusion, though these two presses are each fascinating in their very own method, it does appear to me that there’s extra to this story than simply two new presses. I believe that what we’re truly seeing right here is Canon reasserting itself over its European acquisition Océ. Overseas acquisitions are notoriously tough to handle and it’s all the time appeared to me that Canon struggled to actually deliver Océ absolutely to heel. That is largely all the way down to Océ having a robust R&D staff and the expertise wanted to develop a variety of manufacturing printers, which is in fact what made Océ so engaging to Canon within the first place.
However Canon has a robust tradition of managing from the middle, with the middle being firmly situated in Tokyo, Japan. Switching to Canon’s personal thermal head expertise places the Tokyo R&D middle firmly again within the driving seat. So, no shock that Canon selected to point out off its new prototypes at its personal expo in Yokohama fairly than on the worldwide stage, such because the latest Label Expo or the upcoming Printing United exhibits.
For now, each presses are being proven as expertise previews so there are only a few technical particulars. Kolloczek says that each presses ought to be in Europe for subsequent 12 months’s Drupa although they received’t be commercially out there till 2025. Within the meantime, Japanese readers can see these presses at subsequent week’s Canon expo in Yokohama from 19 to twenty October.
First revealed within the Print and Graphics Journal on 12 October 2023 – www.nessancleary.co.uk