Fuji Xerox Australia today announced the launch of its new production printer, Iridesse™*1 Production Press, a high-end, professional-use printer. For the first time in the industry*2 utilising xerography, this new production printer featuring a six-color print engine is able to print different specialty colors including metallic with a single pass, by housing up to two additional specialty dry inks of gold, silver, clear and white*3.

“Against the backdrop of rapidly diversifying consumers’ needs, the printing industry is adjusting its use of printing techniques,” said Steve Green, Executive General Manager – Sales, Fuji Xerox Australia. “Instead of just relying on conventional offset printing, which performs well for high-volume jobs, more businesses are choosing on-demand printing, which is shorter in turnaround time and prints the necessary number of copies for catalogs, manuals, and advertising materials. Enhancing the value of print products with the use of their capital equipment, such as digital printers, is critical for printing companies to grow their businesses.”
“As the industry leader, Fuji Xerox continues to enhance its product line to help our customers grow their business and uncover new markets,” continued Green. “Customers are looking for a new layer of personalisation, they want bespoke solutions at the speed of now. The Iridesse™*1 Production Press allows printers to deliver authentic, innovative solutions with flexibility and superior customer service.”

First-in-the-industry single-pass, six-color engine realizes wide specialty color printing

With the newly developed single-pass, six-color print engine, Iridesse™ Production Press can print eye-catching images with the xerographic color printing process by using up to two special dry inks selected from gold, silver and clear in addition to the common cyan, magenta, yellow and black (CMYK). Going forward, white dry ink will also be added to the specialty dry ink lineup to accommodate printing on dark coloured or other specialty papers. Compared to prints using only conventional CMYK dry inks, adopting special dry inks expands the range of expression, produces a premium finishing and provides more sense of seasonality of the printed images, which adds value for effective marketing activities.

The newly launched print engine enables CMYK dry ink layers to be processed on top of the special dry ink layer. In addition, an overlay of another specialty dry ink can also be processed on top of CMYK dry ink layers, which is a feature available with the previous product, the Color 1000i Press. While conventional offset printing requires mixing silver ink to make metallic ink, this new product realises simultaneous printing of several metallic colors during a single printing process.

The standard color library equipped in the product contains Pantone+Metallic and Pantone+Premium Metallic, which are swatches of metallic colors commonly used in the printing industry. By utilising these color swatches, the operator can reproduce colors similar to Pantone metallic colours on printing materials by simply designating the colour codes.

High performance to meet the expectations of professional users
CMYK dry inks are made of High Definition EA Dry Ink (hereinafter HD EA Dry Ink)—one of the world’s smallest particle size toners. The HD EA Dry Ink fuses quickly at low temperature and is evenly fused onto the paper by utilising the Company’s marking technology that realises even transferring of six layer of dry inks. Fine/smooth images are realised with 2,400 dots per inch fine resolution and HD EA dry ink, and Iridesse™ Production Press has a high productivity of printing on 400 grams per square meter thick paper at a high speed of 120 pages*4 per minute.
Also, Finisher D6 with Booklet Maker, Crease/Two-sided Trimmer D2, and SquareFold Trimmer D1 can be connected to Iridesse™ Production Press to automatically produce professional booklets and folded leaflets. These finishing options expand the possible printing applications by enabling to produce complex folded leaflets including accordion-fold and gate-fold.

Note 1: Iridesse™ is derived from iridescence which means colors which gradually change (e.g., rainbow colors) depending on changes in the angle of view or the angle of illumination (ex. sea shells, butterfly and dragon fly wings).
Note 2: First as of November 2017 with xerography (dry electrophotography) approach
Note 3: Will be available in the future
Note 4: A4 size landscape