Bob the robot improves automation on IIJ’s XYPrint
The firm is the sales wing for Konica Minolta’s inkjet technology and is exhibiting on the Japanese manufacturer’s booth, M10S. The robotic arm, nicknamed “Bob” is programmed to pick up a batch of items, which are then printed in CMYK using Konica Minolta’s KM1024im heads. The placement accuracy is +/- one micron. The heads can use UV- or water-based inks, have a resolution of 360x720dpi and a linear print speed of 1.2m/sec. It’s an industrial solution. You can throw 300 items at it and 300 come out at the bottom,” explained IIJ managing director John Corrall. “A system like this could print large cell phone covers at 18-25 parts per minute.” An XYPrint 200 would cost around £100,000 depending on configuration. IIJ has also develop a rotary chuck for printing onto bottles and tubes “It’s a flexible system, you could also run it with a conveyor belt,” Corrall added. Konica Minolta is showing its latest high-performance textile printing system, the Nassenger Pro 120, on the booth....
read moreUK POS launches acrylic signs at Fespa
Created by UK POS with an undisclosed Chinese partner company, the transparent acrylic signage range is aimed predominantly at the retail and hospitality industries. The signs are made to order and customers are able to specify lettering and visual designs that will be etched into the cut acrylic sheets and illuminated by a plain or coloured LED bulb sited within chrome wall mounts. The acrylic sheets, which are cut to size and etched at UK POS’s Manchester facility, are available in a wide range of thicknesses to a minimum depth of 2mm. The wall mounts with incorporated LED bulbs are assembled in China. Meanwhile the 45-staff £8m turnover company, which produces signange for the likes of Selfridges, B&Q and Morrisons, hinted at a major expansion on the horizon at its UK facility....
read moreKaye-Dee premieres Bergstein 3D promo printer at Fespa
The Viper can print on products up to 300mm in height, which, said the vendor, accommodates most printable objects. With a speed of 80 seconds per bed of parts, the printer is designed for runs of at least 20,000 products. It’s UV curing technology is designed to enable printing of sensitive plastics. “Speed is the especially exciting feature of this machine,” said Tamara Vroomen, print specialist at Bergstein. “But it also has ionization to reduce static and so misplaced spray of ink, and very easy to use software.” The Viper is priced at £120,000....
read moreTalking T-short wows Fespa crowds
The augmented reality application has been co-developed with interactive media specialist Kangaroo, and uses HP’s Aurasma app and is on show on stand F66N. Live content plays when the t-shirt is viewed via a tablet or smartphone using Kangaroo’s implementation of the app. Potential applications include branded t-shirts at music gigs, with added-value extras such as album tracks or video available to those who purchase a garment. “A lot of young people will access media in this way, because they’ve grown up through apps,” said Kangaroo director Sonny Sharma. Separately, Magic Touch managing director Jim Nicol said demand for transfer printing onto binders and hard surfaces had “gone berserk.”...
read moreBob the robot improves automation on IIJ’s XYPrint
The firm is the sales wing for Konica Minolta’s inkjet technology and is exhibiting on the Japanese manufacturer’s booth, M10S. The robotic arm, nicknamed “Bob” is programmed to pick up a batch of items, which are then printed in CMYK using Konica Minolta’s KM1024im heads. The placement accuracy is +/- one micron. The heads can use UV- or water-based inks, have a resolution of 360x720dpi and a linear print speed of 1.2m/sec. It’s an industrial solution. You can throw 300 items at it and 300 come out at the bottom,” explained IIJ managing director John Corrall. “A system like this could print large cell phone covers at 18-25 parts per minute.” An XYPrint 200 would cost around £100,000 depending on configuration. IIJ has also develop a rotary chuck for printing onto bottles and tubes “It’s a flexible system, you could also run it with a conveyor belt,” Corrall added. Konica Minolta is showing its latest high-performance textile printing system, the Nassenger Pro 120, on the booth....
read moreAtech hails Fespa Roland sales
The LEJ, priced around £45,000, was signed for by Micro Aces for model aircraft printing. The Soljet PRO4 XF-640, priced at £21,000, was bought by Fusion Print for sign and banner work. Another XF-640 sale, to a T-shirt printer, is expected. This will be Atech’s first sale of a Roland model as a dye sublimation printer, marking a new partnership between Atech and ink vendor Hilord. Atech has also sold one Burkle liquid coating line and one Crest RSC 3200 hot and cold knife cutter, both being shown for the first time at Fespa. Managing director Allan Ashman said: “A lot of people come to look and make their minds up later. By the end of August we expect to have made around £1m worth of sales from Fespa.”...
read moreAtech hails Fespa Roland sales
The LEJ, priced around £45,000, was signed for by Micro Aces for model aircraft printing. The Soljet PRO4 XF-640, priced at £21,000, was bought by Fusion Print for sign and banner work. Another XF-640 sale, to a T-shirt printer, is expected. This will be Atech’s first sale of a Roland model as a dye sublimation printer, marking a new partnership between Atech and ink vendor Hilord. Atech has also sold one Burkle liquid coating line and one Crest RSC 3200 hot and cold knife cutter, both being shown for the first time at Fespa. Managing director Allan Ashman said: “A lot of people come to look and make their minds up later. By the end of August we expect to have made around £1m worth of sales from Fespa.”...
read moreLintec launches polyester film window display substrate
The ‘dry’, ultra-smooth film is based on the same technology used to protect smartphone screens and can be screen, solvent and UV inkjet printed. It is delivered covered by a protective film that can simply be peeled off and the substrate placed up against a window. The 100-micron polyester film can be removed and re-used making it attractive to retailers that want to advertise short-term promotions in their windows. The film comes in a standard width of 1.5m, available in rolls or in any sheet size requested, at a price of around £9 per sqm. Managing director Andy Voss said: “The cost is really small compared to what you’ll be paying if you have to get a professional fitter out to put up the standard adhesive acrylics that many people use. “Obviously those can’t be re-used either and not all of them have the benefit of being 100% PVC free, which our films are.”...
read moreLintec launches polyester film window display substrate
The ‘dry’, ultra-smooth film is based on the same technology used to protect smartphone screens and can be screen, solvent and UV inkjet printed. It is delivered covered by a protective film that can simply be peeled off and the substrate placed up against a window. The 100-micron polyester film can be removed and re-used making it attractive to retailers that want to advertise short-term promotions in their windows. The film comes in a standard width of 1.5m, available in rolls or in any sheet size requested, at a price of around £9 per sqm. Managing director Andy Voss said: “The cost is really small compared to what you’ll be paying if you have to get a professional fitter out to put up the standard adhesive acrylics that many people use. “Obviously those can’t be re-used either and not all of them have the benefit of being 100% PVC free, which our films are.”...
read moreSpeedscreen scores European Durst first
The 1012 will replace some screen capacity and run alongside a battery of analogue and digital wide-format kit already at Speedscreen, including a Durst Rho 800 flatbed and Rho 320 roll-to-roll. Tim Hill, Speedscreen managing director, said that he had been looking at investing in additional high-speed flatbed kit for a while and had thoroughly researched the market, including tests on some of the rival machines launched at Fespa. “I was never quite convinced by the others, but when I saw the Durst hidden away at an open house event in April I was just blown away. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing, the litho-like quality at the speed it was running, but I got my stopwatch out and more or less made my mind up there and then,” said Hill. “The comparibly compact footprint, thanks to the belt system concept, was another massive bonus.” The machine on the Austrian manufacturer’s stand at Fespa will be delivered direct to Speedscreen’s Maidstone, Kent site. The 2012 features Durst’s next generation Quadro Array printheads. The Quadro Array 12M printheads on the Rho 1012 have a drop size of 12 picolitres, offering 1,000dpi at speeds of up to 490sqm/hr. “It will be more than 10 times faster than our 800. We’ve just completed a job that took 60 hours, but on the 1012 it would have taken five hours, it will transform what we can do. It will certainly win back the work we’ve been losing on turnaround times,” said Hill The 1012 is equipped with eight ink channels. Standard configuration is four-colour, CMYK, while the remaining four channels can be configured with various combinations of light cyan, light magenta, white and Durst’s Process Colour Addition (PCA) inks of either orange and green, or orange and violet. Speedscreen’s 2.5m-wide machine will be configured CMYK, Lc, Lm and with three-quarter automation. According to Hill, his close working relationship with Durst will mean that his machine will also benefit from a number of developments over the next few months. “We’re not a beta site, in the sense that it’s a fully tested machine and we have purchased it, but there will be other things down the road that Durst will introduce, but I can’t say too much,” he added....
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