Kornit Digital has announced a new industrial direct to garment printer, the Atlas, which has been designed for high volume garment decorators and mid to large size screen printers.
It has a printing area of 60 x 90cm and can produce up to 350,000 impressions per year. It incorporates a wrinkle detection system and will print to a wide range of substrates including cotton, polyester, silk, leather, denim, linen, lycra and wool.
Kornit says that it has reworked the imaging system and that this represents a new generation design. Kornit is continuing to use Fujifilm Dimatix heads but has switched to the recirculating Starfire 1024. Consequently the Atlas has a drop size of 28 picolitres, smaller than the 35 picolitres of the existing printers, which should lead to improved image quality. Resolution remains the same as with previous models at 1200 dpi. The Atlas also gains the ability to detect and compensate for missing nozzles. The ink delivery system has a pre-flood detection, an improved flushing process and more notifications and alerts to prevent any problems with the print heads from happening in the first place.
Kornit has reworked its NeoPigment ink to produce a new EcoRapid version. Oliver Luedtke, marketing director for Kornit in Europe, says that the big benefit is that there’s no smell or scent with these inks. The older inks can retain a vinegary smell that comes from the pre-treatment fluid. Luedtke explains: “The pre-treatment in the Eco-Rapid is now completely odourless so it will be much easier for brands and printers to put a Kornit-printed shirt into a shop next to the screen-printed shirts.”
The inkset consists of six colours – CMYKRG. There’s also a new white ink that’s said to have a similar level of opacity to a screen ink. The EcoRapid ink has Oeko-Tex Eco-Passport certification and is GOTS pre-approved.
This ink is supplied in bulk four litre bottles. The new ink will be integrated with new Storm HD6 and Avalanche HD6/HDK systems and can be used with existing Kornit HD printers though they will need an upgrade kit, which mainly means filters and some parts that might suffer wear and tear. Kornit is hoping to switch all of its existing HD customers to NeoPigment Eco-Rapid ink during this year.
Kornit is also working on developing cloud-based business intelligence, productivity analytics and optimization software platforms, which should be available in the second half of this year. Naturally the Atlas has been designed with this in mind, meaning that will support fleet management even across multi-site businesses.
Omer Kulka, Kornit’s vice president of Marketing and Product Strategy, commented: “This is a huge leap forward, not only for Kornit, but also for the direct-to-garment industry as a whole. We have delivered the Atlas on the collective feedback of thousands of Kornit systems’ operators and on the experience collected from hundreds of millions of printed garments – simply put, the Atlas is the best and most cost-efficient direct-to-garment printing technology for high-quantity and high-quality production requirements. On top of that, the Atlas has been designed in a modular and future-ready way, driving quick and easy implementation of new developments in the future.”
The new Atlas is available immediately, at least within the European market, for a price of €570,000. You can find more details on it at Kornit.com.
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