HP announced a number of new initiatives at last week’s Fespa 2017 show, including couple of new latex printers and an extension to the PrintOs.
The new latex printers are the 3200 and 3600, both 3.2m wide production machines. Both printers have gained a number of tweaks to improve overall productivity and cut operating waste. This includes automatic maintenance of printheads, the ability for a single operator to manage up to four printers simultaneously, the option to use heavy-duty rolls for fewer roll changes. There’s a new HP Latex Media Saver, which HP claims will save up to one linear meter per roll and a new tiling mode with an improved colour consistency. The 3600 can take 10-litre HP ink supplies for overnight runs and can handle production peaks of up to 35,000 square meters per month.
HP has also added new options around its Scitex 17000 corrugated flatbed printer. There’s a new Flexible Media Loader that allows this printer to handle substrates such as paper. At the show it was running 150gsm paper.
In addition, HP has extended its PrintOS, which was launched last year for Indigo, to now cover the Scitex and latex printers. This offers a collection of apps running in the cloud that users can draw on. These apps include Print Beat, which shows the performance of printers to allow users to continuously improve their operations; Media Locator, to find HP certified media; and Site Flow, which optimises management of jobs form submission to shipment.
HP also showed off its Print and Cut solution, which was announced earlier this year, which essentially bundles a cutting plotter from Suma with the 54ins Latex 315 and 64ins Latex 335 printers. There seemed to be some suggestion on the stand that you could only use the designated cutter and the associated Latex printer though I can’t see any real reason why you couldn’t just use another cutter, which I presume is what Latex 300 users have been doing up to now. Equally none of the staff on the stand thought that the cutter could be used with other printers, which could be an issue for some users given that the cutter will probably have a much longer life span than the printers.
Leave a Reply