Digital Printing Trends (below)

The technique of vibrating and dropping ink, known as Piezoelectric technology, is a patent of Epson. A small piezoelectric chip is placed on top of an inkjet nozzle, and a little current is applied to the chip to generate vibrations. Vibrate drops the ink. Although these two drop-on-demand inkjet technologies are widely used, they are still mainly used in production. The bubble type is used in low-end personal printing equipment and proofing.
Inkjet printing equipment is mainly based on the drop-on-demand technology, because the inkjet head has become a standard component that can be replaced, many manufacturers mass production, in the replacement and price advantage. The continuous inkjet ink jet heads must be manufactured consistently by the printer manufacturers as a whole, and therefore are not widely used. There are only two types of inkjet heads: the ultra-high efficiency printing system (Kodak Versamark, formerly known as Scitex Digital Printing), and Ultra High color quality printing system (Creo's former Iris device). On-demand ink drop equipment manufacturers, Agfa Dotrix, Durst, Inca Digital, Nur, Océ, Scitex Vision, Vutek and so on.
Another manufacturer of inkjet printing engines for wide-format printing equipment, there are Canon, Encad, Epson, HP, Mutoh and other manufacturers. Drop-on-demand patterns are indeed more flexible than other kinds of technology and can be used to print grayscale levels, that is, ink droplets can be controlled in size, just like traditional printed dot-making. The size of the ink droplets is transmitted to the piezoelectric chip by different sound signals, generating vibrations of different sizes, allowing the ink droplets to be ejected to have different sizes, and to produce gray-scale images. Grayscale inkjet heads, mainly produced by Saar and Toshiba.
The above outlines the current state of digital printing technology. This time DRUPA expects that all manufacturers will exhibit new equipment, but there should be no major breakthrough in technology. It is worth noting that several inkjet technologies were announced at the end of last year. Kodak STREAM is a continuous new technology for ink jet. It is heated around the nozzle to let the ink drop. No need to print the ink on the paper, then it blows air to the recovery tank, because the heat can control the size of the ink drop, so Grayscale function. This technology claims to significantly reduce costs, print speed is also increased to 640dpi printing 1.2 meters per second, 320dpi printing 2.3 meters per second. In addition to Kodak, Olympus and Riso released the world's fastest color printing system last year, which can print 105 (A4) color pages per minute, and costs only 2 cents (not including paper, only four pages of ink 5% calculation) This printing system sells for about $30,000. In addition, Agfa Dotrix and Inca Digital introduced a single-scan color inkjet engine for wide-format printing devices.
The digital printing technology of static film printing is much more mature than ink-jet technology, and it will grow slowly in the future. On the one hand, it will increase speed (currently, monochrome printing can reach 1,000 pages per minute and color printing can reach 140 pages per minute). On the one hand, it develops for individuals with low-cost equipment and competes with low-grade inkjet equipment. In the inkjet printing market, wide-format printing, high-quality color printing, and personal use printing have already taken their place. However, whether or not they can compete with static film printing mainstream equipment, replace them, and even continue with traditional printing for a longer period of time, depends on further development. R&D to increase speed, improve quality, and reduce costs. Inkjet technology still has a lot of room for development.