Santa Clara, CA, – FUJIFILM Dimatix strengthened its standing as the world's leading supplier of drop-on-demand inkjet printheads for industrial applications with an impressive showing to attendees of the 19th annual Shanghai International Ad, Print, Pack & Paper Expo. The company surpassed expectations with the range and versatility of its inkjet technology both in the Dimatix booth and around the show floor, where the company's high-performance Q-Class printheads and respected Skywalker and Nova product lines powered more than 30 different printer designs.

The 2011 APPPEXPO, which took place July 6-9 at the 150,000-square-meter Shanghai New International Expo Centre, provided a major business platform for leading global advertising and sign companies and their suppliers from around the world.

From Printing and Decorating to Materials Deposition

With its more than 100,000 visitors, APPPEXPO 2011 set the stage for FUJIFILM Dimatix to demonstrate the performance and versatility of its drop-on-demand inkjet printheads for applications from wide-format graphics production to decorating products from textiles and wood to ceramics.

The company also tapped the venue's international reach to showcase its DMP-2800 and DMP-3000. Dimatix Materials Printers are designed for non-contact printing of functional fluids for a range of applications from assessing DNA arrays and developing products for biotechnology applications to manufacturing printed electronics.

The DMP-2800 is a bench-top materials printer designed for micro-precision jetting of functional fluids onto virtually any surface. It can build and define patterns over an area of 200 x 300 mm onto substrates up to 25 mm thick using single-use Dimatix Materials Cartridge printheads based on the company's proprietary Silicon MEMS (Si MEMS) technology.

The freestanding DMP-3000 features a printable area of 300 x 300 mm and positional accuracy and repeatability of ± 5 microns and ± 1 micron, respectively. Designed for advanced R&D and process prototyping of small manufacturing volumes, it can jet fluids using Dimatix Materials Cartridge printheads or precision 128-channel Dimatix D-Class silicon MEMS printheads designed for high throughput.

FUJIFILM Dimatix also demonstrated a version of a MerlinTM-single-pass concept press in a web configuration simulating the production of RFID tags, printed electronic circuits, and corrugated paper product decoration. Merlin systems are comprised of an industrial controller with support for up to 48 printheads. Printheads can be arranged in various width clusters from 2.5 to 30-inches, in monochrome to more than 4-colors with laned or contiguous imaging possible. Merlin systems are easily integrated to existing production lines and are used for product decoration and materials deposition manufacturing applications.

Dimatix Based OEM Printing Systems

In addition to the various displays at the FUJIFILM Dimatix booth, the company's inkjet printheads were represented around the Expo floor by leading OEMs who collectively exhibited more than 30 high-performance and value priced UV and solvent printers based on Dimatix printheads. These included an exceptionally strong showing by Chinese printer manufacturers Shenzen Runtianzhi Image Technology Co. Ltd., GongZheng Technology Development Co., Ltd., Wit-Color Digital Science & Technology Co., Hangzhou Honghua Digital Technology Stock Co. Ltd., and Teckwin International.

Strong demand for the Dimatix 512-jet Polaris printhead was evident in the many OEM products on the show floor that incorporated the new Q-Class technology in their latest wide-format and flatbed inkjet printer designs. Most of these featured new Polaris PQ-512/15 and PQ-512/35 units with as few as two printheads providing a total of 1,024 channels to units that were equipped with as many as 12 printheads for jetting ink through more than 6,000 independent nozzles. Included among them were a new 5-meter-wide UV design from Beijing Innovation Technology Co., Ltd. (JHF), and a new 5-meter-wide UV model from Teckwin, each of which featured 12 Polaris PQ-512/15 heads.

The Polaris PQ-512 series are general-purpose drop-on-demand printheads that utilize the binary operating mode of Dimatix' VersaDropTM jetting technology and Q-Class construction to deliver adjustable ink drop sizes from 15 to 150 picoliters from 512 individually addressable nozzles, at frequencies up to 45 kHz with exceptional straightness.

The Q-Class platform also accommodates a broad range of inks including UV-curable, aggressive organic solvents and aqueous inks making the Polaris series and other Q-Class printheads suitable for a wide variety of commercial and industrial printing applications such as wide-format, label and decorative printing, at resolutions to 1000 dpi.

This hallmark Q-Class flexibility and performance extends to Dimatix Sapphire and Emerald printheads with VersaDropTM grayscale operating modes for high-performance graphics printing applications.

Additional printer models displayed on the show floor included a Nova-based solvent printer from Korean manufacturer DGI Company, and a Skywalker HD design demonstrated by Wit-Color.

"The Shanghai International Ad, Print, Pack & Paper Expo is recognized as a world-class event for the global advertising and sign industry and a showcase for inkjet technology in the Far East," said Russell Brown, Marketing Manager, OEM Printheads. "Our presence at this year's show clearly demonstrated the strength of our position in the Chinese inkjet printing market with a comprehensive range of inkjet printheads capable of addressing the broad spectrum of industrial applications."