Fujifilm introduces Samba DMP cartridge

Fujifilm Dimatix has announced a Samba cartridge for use with its Dimatix Materials Printer, the DMP 2800-series. The DMP is a useful tool to help press vendors test their inks and develop their printing engines without having to first build a full scale printer.

Essentially, this cartridge is a scaled down printhead with a very small number of nozzles. David Grose, product manager for Fujifilm Dimatix, explains: “The cartridges are for use with the DMP, and as such aren’t intended for volume production. They are excellent tools for doing fluid and application development as they can use a very small volume of what is often a very expensive test fluid. Once these critical aspects of product development are ironed out the road to a Samba printer is much quicker, as the waveform developed with the DMP can be ported over to the printer with Samba.”

As such, this new cartridge is based on the Samba G3L and has the same internal jet design, jetting characteristics, and native drop volume as the Samba G3L printhead, which allows an easy transition from R&D applications to commercial production with the Samba G3L printhead. It features a native drop volume of 2.4 pL, which allows for ultra-fine line widths from a single dot size of 30μm. It has 12 nozzles with a native resolution of 75dpi. It includes a separate 1.5 mL tank that researchers can fill with their own fluid materials. As with the Samba, the new cartridge works best with relatively low viscosity fluids in the 4-8cPs range. 

Up to now, Fujifilm has offered customers a generic cartridge for use with the DMP, with a choice between 1 and 10pL drop volumes. This has enabled users to get a good understanding of how their fluids perform. But advances in engineering and manufacturing has allowed Fujifilm to shrink the features of the Samba to match the cartridge form factor so that customers can get a much more precise idea of how their fluids will perform with a production printhead.

Martin Schoeppler, president and CEO of Fujifilm Dimatix, says: ”Today, we launch an innovative product that puts the large-scale Samba G3L printhead jet design into a small cartridge form factor. In unifying the jet design of the DMP Samba cartridge with that of the high-performance and scalable Samba G3L printhead, Fujifilm Dimatix provides a path from R&D to full-scale production manufacturing, which will be invaluable to the growth of functional printing.”

He adds: “We believe that the ability to analyse in-flight drop formation and jetting characteristics, joined with direct development on an industrial inkjet printhead jet design at a small scale, will facilitate R&D to transition to a production environment, and Fujifilm Dimatix will help customers achieve this by starting with the Samba family of products.”

For now, the Samba cartridge mimics the G3L printhead, but Fujifilm is also planning to introduce a Samba G5L version followed by a Samba GMA cartridge. 

The DMP itself is a tabletop system that’s supplied as a complete turnkey solution with software, a cleaning station and heated vacuum platen. As well as helping vendors develop inks and presses, it can also be used to prototype products such as flexible circuits, RFID tags, DNA arrays and wearable electronics. You can find further details on the DMP and the new Samba cartridges from fujifilm.com.