Canon has announced a new continuous feed inkjet press, the Océ ProStream, which will be shown at the Hunkeler Innovation Days. It’s designed for applications such as premium direct mail and marketing collateral, personalised catalogues, brochures and books.
It boasts a new high-definition 1200 dpi printhead, that Canon calls DigiDot. It’s said to produce sharp images with fine details, smooth greyscales, as well as large areas of solid ink coverage. There’s a new pigmented polymer ink set that Canon claims can match or exceed offset colour gamut for high quality applications though I think this will largely depend on the substrate in use. There’s supposedly a new non-contact drying system that allows for dense ink coverage though most inkjet presses already use a combination of heaters and recirculated hot air from within the press to avoid damaging the paper from heavy covereage of water-based inks. It does use Canon’s ColorGrip, which is basically an additive to the ink so that it works with both standard coated and uncoated offset papers from 60 to 160 gsm.
It has a print width of 540mm and a relatively slow speed of 80mpm. Canon says that it’s capable of producing 35 million A4 pages per month.
Peter Wolff, Senior Director Customer Groups Commercial Printer and Production CRD at Canon Europe commented: “We talk to many customers who are looking for a continuous inkjet press that combines the vibrant colours associated with offset with variable data capability on standard coated papers, allowing for cost efficient white paper solutions with fast time-to-market. With the ProStream, we can now give them that solution.”
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