Industrial color printers are often the kind of printers that are basically very large versions of the inkjet printers people have in their homes. All of them reproduce a digital image by depositing droplets of liquid ink onto a page. The concept of inkjet printing goes back to the 1800s. But the technology needed to actually do it didn’t come around until the 1950s. By the late 1970s, inkjet printers for the reproduction of digital images were being developed by Canon, Hewlett-Packard, and Epson. Today a fourth “big brand” has been added: Lexmark.
Most professional inkjet printers are for wide format printing. That means that they range in width from 24 inches to 15 feet. Smaller page-width printers are used in creation of catalogs, newspapers, and billing applications. The wide format printers are used for making advertisements and sometimes for printing technical drawings and architectural plans.
Industrial color printers with inkjet technology are also used in prepress operations, making proofs for color digital print jobs. They’re made to give accurate color reproduction before the job is produced large scale on, say, an offset four color press. One common example is an Iris printer. Iris printers are made by Eastman Kodak. They use continuous flow ink systems for continuous tone prints onto various output media, like textiles, linen, silk, canvas, and paper. Iris printers are popular because of the low cost of their ink (often referred to as “consumables”) compared with other print technologies.
The largest supplier of industrial color printers is Hewlett-Packard. They provide more than 90% of the printers used for technical drawings with their Designjet series, which feature six and eight color pigment inking systems. Canon and Epson also make wide format commercial color printers
Professional high-volume industrial color printers using inkjet technology are made by the following companies:
NUR
Oce
Durst
Inca
Grapo
LexJet
Agfa Graphics
Scitex Vision
Zund
VUTEk
Leggett and Platt
Luscher
MacDermid ColorSpan
DGI
Raster Printers
Seiko
Roland DG
Mimaki
Mutoh
Industrial color printers such as these cost anywhere from US$30,000 to US$2 million. Carriage widths are available from 1.4 to 5 m, and the inks used are generally solvent UV-cured inks rather than water based inks. They’re used to make billboards, building graphics, large banners, museum graphics, sales displays, and large indoor displays.
But commercial color printers don’t just do media that are strictly for viewing, they can also be made to place an image onto an “edible web” that’s used to decorate cakes using food-grade colors.
Industrial color printers are part of a competitive economic sector. Customers want quick turnaround times, and graphics in bright, living colors. Some jobs are done with CMYK, also known as four color printing. The four inks are cyan, magenta, yellow, and “key black.” CMYK works by masking (partially or totally) colors on a white background by absorbing certain wavelengths of light. Another model is RGB (for red green blue) which is based on the additive combinations of primary colored lights.
Hewlett Packard Indigo digital presses are made to meet all printing requests with the look and feel of offset printing with the use of HP ElectroInk, which HP claims equals the quality and range of colors of offset printing. The translucent ElectroInk makes droplets of one to two microns in diameter, which allows very detailed renderings.
For jobs that require Pantone color (a standard color set with each color assigned a number, with details within the numbers for color separation used by pro printers for calibrating color reproduction), the HP IndiChrome is one of the industrial color printers that is Pantone licensed. It uses a six color solution: CMYK, plus violet and orange, for 1,125 Pantone colors. Today’s commercial color printers seek to provide offset quality with the flexibility that only comes from a digital press.
Label and barcode printers
Not all industrial print jobs are large-scale, however. Label printers and barcode printers also find their place in industrial print jobs. Label printers can be found in just about any size or price range. Different businesses have different labeling needs, whether the labels are price tags on designer clothing or hazardous waste labels on used medical supplies. Label printers are also used quite often to produce mailing labels. In general , the more that is expected from a commercial label printer, the more it will cost.
A label printer in the US$200 to $300 range will make strips of labels from a regular computer system, from bar codes to price tags to inspection labels. These usually have auto-cutter capabilities and the ability to create crack-and-peel labels that are easy to peel. You will typically be able to use regular or extra strong adhesive, and many office label makers come with built in symbols and base code templates. These will usually p rint jobs in quantities of up to several thousand at once. Office label makers usually use thermal transfer printing, and you can expect print resolution of 360 dpi or thereabout.
Large volume
On the other hand, large volume applications require industrial label printers like the Datamax I-4212, which can print up to 12 inches per second. This industrial label maker has a die-cast aluminum frame for sturdiness. High end industrial label makers can handle wider labels than traditional office label makers. You can get expansion cards for industrial label makers like the Datamax I-4212 that adds extra label formats, downloadable fonts, graphics, and international language printing.
Like labeling requirements, bar code requirements vary widely depending on application. For one-off bar code generation that you can embed or print directly from the web, there are free services like Barcodesinc.com into which you type in text to generate a printable, scannable barcode. Barcodesinc.com allows Interleaved 2 of 5, Code 128 A, B, or C, and Code 39 symbologies. They can be embedded into web generated documents as well as printed and scanned.
For $700 or so, you can buy a bar code printer that works with PCs and comes with menu software to make generation of bar codes easier. In general, laser and inkjet printers cannot print barcodes without add-on components. Some companies provide add-on flash cards. The smaller barcode printers are usually limited in the number of different symbologies they can use, but that is not always problematic.
The two main types of bar code printers are direct thermal printers and thermal transfer printers. Thermal transfer printers use a ribbon and print head, while direct thermal does not use a ribbon. Thermal transfer bar code printers can use print on more materials than direct thermal printers. Direct thermal bar code printers are best for applications where bar codes are not being gene rated in huge quantities. But for printing thousands of bar codes at one time a thermal printer is best.
Industrial color printers range from office mailing label printers that add color logos, to enormous graphics printers that create billboard size images. The technology for industrial color printers continues to mesh with improvements in computer technology to make it easier to get excellent results quickly, with better a better color range than ever. A commercial color printer can cost under $100 or over $35,000 and can fit on a printer stand or require their own warehouse space. The one thing they all have in common is technology that makes commercial graphics – large scale and small – the highest quality ever, with prices that will drop as the technology matures.