One of the terms that we will be hearing a lot in the long drag to drupa is Industrial Printing. This covers a wide variety of applications where the printed product is a part of an overall production process rather than the finished item. Some of the best-known work in this area would be packaging, labels, parts of electrical and electronic components, etc. I have recently been at two events where industrial printing was an element of these and where some interesting products were to be seen.

The first of these events was FESPA, the major trade show for the screen-printing and large format inkjet display printing markets. It was a large successful event held in Berlin, Germany. I have never before seen so many different suppliers of super-wide (up to 5 metre width) inkjet presses printing onto a huge range of different substrates. There were also an increasing number of wide format (up to 2.3 metres in width) flatbed inkjet printers printing onto rigid substrates up to 3.3 metres in length. These two different types of printers cover a very wide range of markets and have had the effect of radically changing the display, billboard and point of purchase markets.

The product that caught my attention most however came from Screen in Japan. This is the same company that surprised the world almost two years ago when it introduced its Truepress Jet520 high-speed inkjet based color press that runs at around 400 A4 pages/minute. There new two new Screen products but the one I found particularly interesting was the Truepress Jet650 UV. This is a very different product from all the other inkjet-based presses on view at FESPA. It has a relatively small print area of 644 x 594 mm (25.35 x 23.38 inches) and is designed to print a wide variety of materials in very high quality. The print bed handling the material to be printed has very accurate positioning and allows for multiple pass printing. The surface of the substrate does not have to be completely flat. The printer uses printheads from Toshiba Tec that allow for very small ink droplets and for multiple size ink droplets. Screen executives say that the press is suitable for a wide range of different applications in industries like electronics and instrumentation and were showing samples of printed panels from the automotive industry. Screen also showed a new high-quality flatbed press the Truepress Jet 2500UV which uses the same printheads and appears to set a new quality standard for this market. Screen is making a major move to make inkjet printing one of its core businesses.