Inkjet single pass color printing with UV curable ink.

Studies on an inkjet printhead, capable of 847 mm/s printing rate with 600 dpi single pass resolution for 108 mm print swath, were reported by one of the authors. In this study, the printhead is applied to UV curable inks for color prints on non absorbable media. Four of the printheads are arranged for a color printing system using Y, M, C and K UV curable inks accompanied with a UV lamp. Studies are made on effects of printing and curing procedure for image quality achieved by the printer. As a general tendency, it is confirmed that the faster a print speed becomes, the image quality got improved in terms of sharpness. The results reveal dependency of image quality upon a time that allows drops to be driven on a media by surface tension before the curing. Also, the images obtained by the single pass printing with a certain pass speed shows potential for practical applications in terms of image quality as well as productivity although it is limited in a certain application area that uses relatively simple images.