Inkjet Printing - Professional Inkjet Printers

Professional Inkjet Printers

In addition to the widely used small inkjet printers for home and office, there are professional inkjet printers, some for "page-width" format printing and many for wide format printing. Page-width format means that the print width ranges from about 8.5" to 37" (about 20 cm to 100 cm). "Wide format" means print width ranging from 24" up to 15' (about 75 cm to 5 m). The most common application of page-width printers is in printing high-volume business communications that do not need high-quality layout and color. Particularly with the addition of variable data technologies, the page-width printers are important in billing, tagging, and individualized catalogs and newspapers. The application of most wide format printers is in printing advertising graphics; a lower-volume application is printing of design documents by architects or engineers.

Another specialty application for inkjets is producing prepress color proofs for printing jobs created digitally. Such printers are designed to give accurate color rendition of how the final image will look (a "proof") when the job is finally produced on a large volume press such as a four-colour offset lithography press. An example is an Iris printer, whose output is commonly called "iris proofs" or just "irises".

The largest-volume supplier is Hewlett-Packard, which supply over 90 percent of the market for printers for printing technical drawings. The major products in their Designjet series are the Designjet 500/800, the Designjet T Printer series (including the T1100 & T610), the Designjet 1050 and the Designjet 4000/4500. They also have the HP Designjet 5500, a six-color printer that is used especially for printing graphics as well as the new Designjet Z6100 which sits at the top of the HP Designjet range and features an eight colour pigment ink system .

Epson, Kodak and Canon also manufacture wide-format printers, sold in much smaller numbers than standard printers. Epson has a group of 3 Japanese companies around it that predominantly use Epson piezo printheads and inks: Mimaki, Roland, and Mutoh.

Scitex Digital Printing developed high-speed, variable-data, inkjet printers for production printing, but sold its profitable assets associated with the technology to Kodak in 2005 who now market the printers as Kodak Versamark™ VJ1000, VT3000, and VX5000 printing systems. These roll-fed printers can print at up to 1000 feet per minute.

Professional high-volume inkjet printers are made by a range of companies. These printers can range in price from US$35,000 to $2 million. Carriage widths on these units can range from 54" to 192" (about 1.4 to 5 m), and ink technologies tend toward solvent, eco-solvent and UV-curing as opposed to water-based (aqueous) ink sets. Major applications where these printers are used are for outdoor settings for billboards, truck sides and truck curtains, building graphics and banners, while indoor displays include point-of-sales displays, backlit displays, exhibition graphics and museum graphics.

The major suppliers for professional wide- and grand-format printers include: Agfa Graphics, LexJet, Grapo, Inca, Durst, Océ, NUR (now part of Hewlett-Packard), Lüscher, VUTEk, Zünd, Scitex Vision (now part of Hewlett-Packard), Mutoh, Mimaki, Roland DG], Seiko I Infotech, Sun Innovations, Leggett and Platt, Agfa, Raster Printers, DGI and MacDermid ColorSpan (now part of Hewlett-Packard)