By Barney Cox
Kodak used Print UK to unveil a new wide-format printer, the 5260, which it claims competes with products costing 10 times more.

The 5260 produces up to 45m per hour at saleable quality for close-up viewed indoor display and point of purchase work.

Until now the only way to get quality in ink-jet was dpi, said Yves Millette, vice president ink-jet printing systems, Kodak Professional. Guess what, you don't need to, it adds a lot of overhead. We've got a far more elegant solution.

The dynamic contone technology it has developed uses five different sized ink droplets, with the image density determining the most appropriate size of droplet to fire for each pixel.

This allows it to use much lower resolutions and therefore faster printing and ripping speeds to produce the quality equivalent to rival products.

The 5260 uses 600dpi piezo print heads developed and manufactured to Kodak's specification, although the firm will not reveal the supplier.

It is a 62in-wide six-colour machine (CMYK plus light cyan and light magenta) that offers 300, 600 and 1,200dpi resolution. It is available with dye or pigment-based inks.

Onyx Postershop will be the first RIP to drive the 5260, followed by BestColor. A software developer kit allows other RIP vendors to develop products for the machine.

Kodak claimed that the 21,000 ($30,000) machine competed with products costing up to 250,000 on quality and productivity.