drupa 2020 may be postponed until 2021, but new product announcements spurred by pre-drupa development are still coming, and you can expect even more to come. Today’s announcements come from Xeikon.

Since Benoit Chatelard took the helm of Xeikon and Digital Solutions at the Flint Group, there has been a renewed focus on how to best use their significant legacy and expertise to serve the changing market requirements. The resultant plan continues to leverage their extensive high-resolution LED array-based EP technology and introduce new Inkjet solutions in the form of their Panther line. From a market application perspective, historically Xeikon roots were in commercial graphic arts (GA) solutions, but later on they successfully moved into label and packaging. While they didn’t leave GA, it “appeared” as though they didn’t bring that same level of development effort to GA solutions that they had been putting into labels and packaging. With the announcement of their new SIRIUS EP platform and the SX30000, they show their commitment to GA and to reenergizing EP as a valuable component of their future offerings.

The SX30000 is built on Xeikon’s new SIRIUS platform, which is designed, along with their new Cheetah 2.0 platform (see below) to increase the “overall equipment effectiveness” (OEE) of a machine and the entire process. OEE is finally becoming a focus of industry manufacturers and suppliers, enabling higher and, more importantly, measurable productivity. The hardware changes, which include design improvements in substrate conditioning, print towers, fusing, and cooling, enable higher running speeds, up to 30m/m (98 f/pm) or the equivalent of 404 A4 pages/min. That is a 30% increase over their current “high performance” model, the 9800 built on their Castor platform which tops out at 21.5 m/m. More importantly, the new platform has a higher performance ratio on thicker media (see below) as a result of the larger and more responsive print media conditioner (PMC) in addition to design improvements in fusing and cooling.