Seiko Epson Corporation (Tokyo, Japan) will add two new printheads to its portfolio in the second half of the 2021 fiscal year ending March 2022. The new products will strengthen the OEM’s line-up for applications such as signage and easily allow printers to deliver high print quality at high speed. The T3200-U3 enables simultaneous, high-quality, four-colour CMYK printing at high speed from a single printhead. Furthermore, incorporating a heater in the printhead makes printing possible even with highly viscous UV ink, and thus can provide an optimal digital printing environment especially for printing signage and product packages. The two-colour T1600-U3 will be released to market at the same time. These new products will expand Epson’s PrecisionCore printhead line to a sixth series and provide a diverse range of digital printing environments, Epson added.
Ordinarily, a pair of two-colour printheads must be combined to print in four colours of ink. The T3200, however, can eject the four CMYK colours from a single printhead. Moreover, a precision-processed positioning mechanism will save users time, trouble and money while providing high-quality printing – because customers will not have to engineer a mechanism to determine the spacing between printheads or make adjustments during installation.
Features of the T3200 and T1600
While Epson’s current four-colour printhead, the I3200, has an effective print width of 33.8 mm (1.33”), the T3200 and T1600 have an effective print width nearly double that, at 67.2 mm (2.65”). Furthermore, the T3200 and T1600 have a different type of piezoelectric actuator than the I3200 to enable the ejection of larger ink droplets at higher frequencies. This facilitates faster printing without compromising the high image quality and easy installation for which the I3200 is known. The T3200 and T1600 are also the first printheads in the Epson PrecisionCore series to have a built-in heater. The heater makes it possible to eject UV inks of various viscosities, expanding the range of applications – especially for signage and product packaging.
A variety of printers can be developed by combining the T3200 and T1600
The four-colour T3200 and the two-colour T1600 can be flexibly arranged to enable users to develop many different types of printers with different numbers of colours and speeds. For example, the T3200 can be equipped with CMYK ink and the T1600 can be equipped with special inks such as white and varnish. The two new products will also accelerate the digitization of signage printing and provide customers with an environment in which high-quality, high-speed printing can be more easily implemented in printers. Epson added that it’ll continue to develop original technology to contribute to the expansion of its customers’ businesses and further accelerate inkjet innovation.