On Dec 8, 2017, at 3:20 PM, Roger Breton <graxx@videotron.ca> wrote:
Scott, I confess I have not personally seen much "UV curable inkjet printing" in my young carreer. Please excuse my ignorance but where have you seen them being used?
Hey Roger. I’ve been working with UV Curable “inkjet” printers at client sites for over 17 years. The likes from Vutek, Oce Arizona, Jeti, Agfa, Durst, Vanguard and others. These machines can have a high price tag (some are near a million US$) but are very affordable to run with cheap inks, materials and fast speeds which translate into high productivity. They are the top dog option for signage printing but the quality has gotten good enough recently for fine art work. Of course the ability to print on nearly everything including metal and glass is an advantage. I’ve seen people take their wood fence sections and car hoods and throw them in these printers. I have a video of a Vutek 100Pro in action at https://vimeo.com/91924432 <https://vimeo.com/91924432> I focus more on the high end large format printing market rather than offset printing. I didn’t get it that Mike was asking about UV offset pritning though - my mistake. Fun to see this technology make it to offset. FWIW, all of the large format printers we work with today (solvent, latex, aqueous, UV, etc) use the same type of pigments. But these pigments start life in powder form and can't be delivered to the page easily without a liquid “vehicle”. So our desktop inkjet printers use an aqueous vehicle, and are therefore more accurately called “aqueous printers”. These UV Curable printers use a UV curing liquid vehicle, solvent printers a solvent vehicle, etc. At least that's how Epson head engineer uncharge of ink explained it to me... It’s also worth saying that there are UV liquid lamination machines that use a clear UV “ink” to coat prints with an unusually durable coating. As a bonus, this enhances the DMax and saturation of the inks underneath (which UV inks historically need). Scott Martin www.on-sight.com