Agfa hosts first public showing of new top-end hybrid

Agfa Graphics has shown off its new Jeti Tauro H3300 LED hybrid printer in public for the first time at an event held at its Belgian headquarters.

Taking place across Tuesday (12 June) and Wednesday, the manufacturer invited more than 300 guests to the event in Mortsel, predominantly existing and prospective customers.

The event centred around the 3.3m-wide H3300 LED, which was announced at Fespa in Berlin last month but was not shown at that event as the manufacturer instead chose to use an immersive booth concept to introduce the machine.

Commercially available immediately, the H3300 LED builds on the existing Jeti Tauro H2500 LED.

The machine is available as a roll-to-roll system or with manual loading and unloading, semi-automation or full automation. With the latter version a pick and place system picks up boards or sheets directly from the pallet and places them onto the media registration table.

Three colour configurations are also available; the six-colour (CMYK, light cyan, light magenta) Jeti Tauro H3300 LED 6C, the six-colour plus white Jeti Tauro H3300 LED 6C W12 and the six-colour plus white and primer Jeti Tauro H3300 LED 6C W8P4.

Capable of printing at resolutions up to 635x1,200dpi, the machine can handle media up to 50mm thick and can print at speeds of up to 453sqm/hr.

The roll-to-roll and fully automated configurations of the machine were both shown running live in Mortsel. Across two demo rooms, the manufacturer also showed a raft of its other kit running live and held expert sessions to discuss its inks, workflow software and financing options.

Speaking at the event, Agfa Graphics sign and display marketing manager Willy Van Dromme emphasised the continued importance of inkjet technology to the group's overall performance.

“During the last eight years, inkjet has seen very nice year-on-year growth. This is despite the fact that we all operate in a very competitive marketplace with very short technology cycles, which puts a constant pressure on the system integrators and developers to keep pace with these cycles.

“2017 was probably the best year for inkjet ever. We had very strong double-digit growth figures and this was thanks to the execution of our roadmap. We added LED across all of our Anapurna products and we managed to sell close to 300 of what we refer to as mid-segment hybrid printers.”