Applications of page wide piezo inkjet printing to commercial and industrial market

Most drop-on-demand digital printing engines on the market must make several passes to print the required information. The multiple pass print architecture limits the use of digital printing in many commercial and industrial applications. To meet the demands for highspeed and high quality digital printing in these applications, page wide single pass print engines with high printing speed and resolution have been developed using Spectra's shear mode piezo inkjet technology. This paper reviews the development work and discusses the potentials of page wide single pass print engines. It has been demonstrated that a large page wide print engine can be built with multiple 2.56-inch wide print swaths using modular design approach. The print engine can reliably operate several thousand nozzles to print 600x600 dots per inch images at 1.6 meters per second. Technical feasibility studies have shown that it meets the requirements of the commercial and industrial application. Examples of using the page wide print engine as a digital add-on to Heidelberg's Quickmaster offset press will be discussed.