Product of the Week

Wide-format transformation to digital began some 20 years ago with Vutek’s first airbrushing machines, and is now just about complete. The UK’s screen printers are almost all tuned into inkjet as either an alternative or a replacement method of production for their screen presses. As the number of screen customers dwindles, the machine suppliers are turning to new markets: namely offset printers wanting to add a wide-format service to their existing offering. The machine to tempt these customers has to be versatile, cheap and capable of producing offset-comparable print. Fuji believes it is about to launch such a machine in the shape of its new Acuity UV flatbed.

Fuji plans to market the Acuity as a machine with “an excellent quality-to-cost ratio”. Steve Cookman, product support manager, explains: “The quality it produces is unusual at this price, and we anticipate a lot of offset printers will be interested in this as a low-risk way of getting into the wide-format market.”

The Acuity’s claim to top quality rests largely on the combination of Fujifilm Sericol’s Uvijet inks – which have a pigment particle size of just one micron – and the capabilities of the imaging head, which produces a variable dot courtesy of its own architecture and the Onyx Production House RIP that drives the machine. Droplet volumes vary from six to 42 picolitres (pl), in increments of six. The imaging head fires the droplets sequentially and they combine while in flight between head and substrate, giving the requisite dot size on paper. Thus, an 18pl dot is actually a combination of three sequentially-fired 6pl droplets.

Rescripting resolutions
As Cookman explains, these microscopic dots drive an enormous coach-and-horses right through conventional notions of resolution. “It’s like having 256 levels of grey,” he says.

“All of a sudden you can’t measure the number of dots you can cram into a square inch, because that’s become a variable, and it depends on the image itself just what dot size you use at any given area on that image.” Accordingly, he describes the Acuity’s output as “comparable to the quality you get at 1,200dpi”. Speed, too, is affected by the number of droplets being fired: naturally, it takes longer to cover a square metre with 6pl dots.

The variable-size droplets, plus the Uvijet inks, mean that Fuji can get away with a simple four-colour printer where other wide-format manufacturers add light versions of their inks to achieve comparable resolution effects. In fact, the Acuity has eight heads (two lots of CMYK) because it images bi-directionally, which simply means that on the heads’ return across the moving gantry, they lay down a row of dots in the reverse direction, rather than imaging in one direction only. “It makes it a bit faster,” explains Cookman. One thing the Acuity does lack, however, is the option to add in white or any special colour. But there is the option to produce a ‘matt’ print, where the UV lamp’s output is stepped up slight­­ly, which has the effect of taking the shine off the image.

Not all good news
One downside of the variable-size droplet imaging heads, however, is that they are considered to be a consumable. Fuji predicts one head failure per year – barring operator mistakes in setting the head height too low – and provides one free additional head in its customer support warranty. Customers with more than one head failure a year will have to shell out £2,200 for a further replacement. Likewise, the UV lamps that sit behind the imaging heads are also a consumable. Each lamp has an expected working life of 500 hours, and costs £600, although Fuji does supply one spare with each Acuity it sells.

The Onyx Production House RIP that front-ends the entire system has a number of useful capabilities, including tiling, edge-to-edge imaging, a generation of cutting profiles and the ability to skip large areas of white space. As for colour management, some profiling capability is provided within the RIP, but Fuji also offers its standalone colour management package, ColourKit. Cookman says: “In the future, we’ll work towards offering the Acuity as part of a broader range of output devices, like our platesetters and proofers, which can now be driven by the Fujifilm XMF cross-media workflow.”

Making the Acuity ready to run is straightforward, if time-consuming on occasion. Each morning calls for a half-hour clean, involving some purging of ink from nozzles, indicated by the printing of a test chart. The inks, too, must warm to a specific temperature, which takes around 20 minutes. Individual jobs are also simple to set up, involving measuring the substrate thickness with a micrometer and setting the imaging heads’ height. Although the vacuum bed is zoned, odd-shaped items still require the cutting of a paper mask to protect the exposed parts of the bed from reflected UV light.

Like all UV flatbeds, the Acuity images direct to its substrate, and requires no further finishing to make it durable in an outdoor environment. Cookman says the Uvijet inks are lightfast up to two years, even in direct sunlight. The Acuity isn’t due its official launch until Drupa in May, but Fuji will show a roll-to-roll retrofit at Fespa in April.

Fujifilm has a handful of Acuity beta-test users spread across the world. Cookman feels that one lure of the machine will be the fact it’s sold by Fuji. “We have a very good understanding of what our customers expect, in terms of both quality and colour,” he says.

At £90,000, the Acuity is not quite the cheapest in its class, but it is the cheapest with variable dot technology; plus cost-in-use is good. Cookman adds: “We reckon about £1 per square metre for all four inks, because the variable dot technology reduces the ink use.” He also points out that Fuji provides its inks in big two-litre pouches, avoiding the need for printers to change their ink supply every 500ml.

New sector
The Acuity breaks Fujifilm Graphic Systems into a new market sector, as this is the company’s first wide-format inkjet. That said, Fujifilm as a group is no stranger to the wide-format sector. When Fuji acquired Sericol in 2005, it also acquired Sericol’s close links with Inca Digital (a move which put it in an interesting juxtaposition with long-term fellow Japanese imaging giant Screen, which acquired Inca in 2003). The new Fujifilm Sericol division continued to sell Inca’s Spyder, Turbo and Onset into its established market of screen printers who were adding digital production to their service offerings. What Fuji’s Graphic Systems division is doing with Acuity is both different and similar: selling its own wide-format machine into its own established market of offset printers. Cookman hopes Acuity will be taken up by the other Fuji divisions. “Not just by the Sericol people to sell to screen printers, but also by our photographic division colleagues to sell to photo printers,” he says.

It’s an interesting move by Fuji in a market that’s been dominated by news of traditional wide-format players withdrawing from the hardware business: Zünd announced last September that it would no longer develop new wide-format printers, while in November DuPont said it would ditch commitment to its Cromaprint range. But Fuji believes a combined hardware/consumables approach suits its business best: “They go hand-in-hand,” says Cookman. “Our plates with our platesetters, our proofing systems with our inkjets, and now our inks with our wide-format printers.”

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SPECIFICATIONS
Print modes/speeds
Fine art matt mode 8m²/hour
Production mode 16m²/hour
Number of colours 4 (8 heads)
Max media size (rigid) 1.25x2.5m
Max media thickness 48mm
Price £90,000
Contact Fujifilm Graphic Systems 01234 245245 www.fujifilm.co.uk/gs

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THE ALTERNATIVES
Agfa Anapurna M
Agfa’s ‘medium’ Anapurna doesn’t use variable dot technology, but its maximum resolution is high. It has six inks, including light cyan. The Agfa Edition Wasatch RIP gives tiling, colour management and borderless print. Roll-to-roll technology is attached, straight out of the box. There’s an automatic feature that sets the head height, which helps to avoid substrate smashes.
Print modes/speeds 14m²/hour (poster mode) to 7m²/hour (photo/sign mode, 720dpix1,440dpi)
Number of colours 6
Max media size (rigid) 1,600mm wide
Max media thickness 48mm
Price £85,000
Contact Agfa UK 020 8231 4929 www.agfa.com

Inca Spyder 320-e
Inca’s lowest-priced Spyder - probably the UK’s single most popular UV flatbed printer range – is still twice the price of the Acuity. Fixed-size droplets are 28pl in size and, while it begins life as a four-colour machine, it’s upgradable to become both faster and use more colours, including a white. Driven by a special-edition Wasatch RIP.
Print modes/speeds 12m²/hour (quality mode) to 16m²/hour (production mode)
Number of colours 4
Max media size (rigid) 3.2x1.6m
Max media thickness 30mm
Price from £180,000
Contact Inca Digital Printers 01223 577800 www.incadigital.com

Océ Arizona 250 GT
This is the machine against which the Acuity goes head-to-head: a flatbed UV printer with variable dot size production, and smack bang in the same price range. Uses the same inkjet heads as the Acuity, with the same 6-42pl droplet size range; inks are similarly packaged in two-litre pouches. The Arizona already has a roll-to-roll option and it’s driven by the Onyx Workflow RIP.
Print modes/speeds 12m²/hour (quality mode) to 16m²/hour (production mode)
Number of colours 4
Max media size (rigid) 1.25x2.5m
Max media thickness 48mm
Price £88,995
Contact Océ UK 0870 600 5544 www.oce.co.uk