Ceramics tile decoration has become a crucial application for industrial inkjet. A brief retrospective on the market can set the stage for the technology advances that enabled the success in ceramics, particularly with respect to the importance of nozzle-based recirculation in print heads.

To understand the ceramic tile production and the reason inkjet proved so successful, you need to look at the way things were done before digital.

Print was done by a combination of flat-screen printing or rotary blanket printer, such as the System Rotocolor machine. Both techniques involved contact to the un-fired (green) tile, thus requiring a certain thickness to give the required strength to withstand the contact force. The printing also involved set-up related to patterning of the screens, or the blankets, and the changeover of these meant stopping the lines.