The printer has been designed with an annual production capacity of up to 350,000 impressions, and is aimed at mid-to-large screen printers, and companies looking to move into textiles.
Kornit said the Atlas is available to order with a two-month lead time. It has a list price of $620,000 (£482,000) and is positioned between the Avalanche and Vulcan devices in the Israeli manufacturer’s portfolio.
“The Atlas has been developed in close collaboration with our key customers,” said Kornit head of global PR Oliver Luedtke. “They are typically asking for higher productivity and lower cost per print, which the Atlas delivers.
“But the system has a number of productivity improvements that are based on customer feedback, such as wrinkle detection, pallets that communicate with the system, a new display with a comprehensive management view. It is the biggest customer-driven technological update that we ever added to a direct-to-garment system.”
In the UK, the Kornit Atlas was beta tested by Westbury-based operation T-Shirt & Sons, alongside DTG2Go in the US. T-Shirt & Sons co-founder Jon Lunt, whose firm invested in the first Kornit Vulcan in Europe last year, commended the “significant boost in garment decoration production through the peak holiday season” that the Atlas provided his company.
Luedtke added: “Our beta testers have provided overwhelmingly positive feedback. We are pitching the product to our existing key accounts, and also from that end we get a very good response.”
Kornit said the Atlas is optimised for flexible garment production in production scenarios such as print-on-demand and e-commerce, covering run lengths from one to 1,000 prints with “practically no setup time”.
It has a six-colour (CMYK, red and green) plus white inkset, uses new recirculating printheads and comes with the newly developed NeoPigment Eco-Rapid ink. Its production process is designed for “a very fine and nice hand feel rivalling screen, with the absence of a discernible scent”, according to Luedtke.
In high productivity mode, it runs at print speeds up to 160 prints/hr on dark garments and 200 prints/hr on light garments with a maximum print area of 600x900mm and resolutions up to 1,200dpi.
