The four presses in the Landa Digital Printing line up at Drupa will be returning to Israel after the show. There they will be put through their paces in several months of intensive testing to wheedle out any weaknesses that have been overlooked – and to test the components to destruction.
“We are going to run them around the clock,” says company founderBenny Landa. “We want to check out the reliability.” This will test the durability of the printheads, the consistency of the inks and it will uncover out any issues around the blanket, namely how long it can be expected to last. This will not be a significant issue, says Benny Landa.
The blanket, in the form of a lightweight belt, is a crucial element in the Landa digital press. The Landa ink is fired to this belt which is heated in order to disperse the water in the ink leaving a dry image to be offset to the final substrate.
This is the crucial advantage of the Landa technology: conventional inkjet delivers water along with the colorant to the substrate, requiring either an additional coating to minimise incursion into the paper fibres or a component in the ink to hold pigment on the paper’s surface. This also has the effect of capping press running speed. Landa’s S10 will be printing at 13,500sph during Drupa.
The Landa blanket is in effect a normal printing blanket deconstructed. It requires only the release layer as the compressible element of the offset blanket is vested in the rollers which push the image into the substrate at the point of transfer.
Once transfer is complete the blanket is washed, not to remove any left over ink (because there is none), but to cleanse it of other debris such as paper dust which might damage the print heads or image quality.
The blanket is a replaceable component that will take 15 minutes to change, but that will be infrequently Benny Landa promises, and it will not be an economic issue for customers.
The cost will be rolled into a volume based pricing model that Landa is developing. Customers will buy the press and there will be payments based on the volume of pages printed. This will cover the cost of the ink, the blanket and service.
Exactly what this will be will be settled before presses are shipped to end users sometime next year. The technology is suited to high coverage levels, unlike conventional inkjet which becomes costly at high coverage even if quality is acceptable.
The first pilot customers will receive machines early next year.. “We have already identified these,” says Landa. “They will be the sorts of customers that we can learn the most from, on the cutting edge of developing markets. They will be companies offering the most value for us.”
The local teams that will bring the presses to market are being gathered along with additional development engineers and staff to assemble the presses. A plant to make ink is under construction and will take over from the set up that is producing ink in the volumes needed at this phase. Work is also scheduled to start on what will be a Landa Digital Printing campus. It will be ready in around three years and by then completion of a press received from Komori would be a matter of weeks or less rather than taking months currently.
If there is pressure on Landa Digital Printing to begin raking in revenues, there are few signs of it. More damaging to the long terms success of the business would be to ship too soon and discover that machines are unreliable in the field.
The preparation for the launch has included in depth discussions with brands that will need to trust the technology. Landa is confident that they will. The inherent advantage of the technology gives it a broader gamut than offset litho.
This is because, Benny Landa explains nano pigment particles, smaller than the wavelength of that colour, do not scatter light in the way that larger particles must. Instead the light reflected back is purer and more vibrant, helped also by the ultra thin layer of ink on paper.
If the colour gamut from four colour printing is large, that from seven-colour printing will cover all possible brand colours. “In theory we can match all the PMS colours that it’s possible to print,” he says.
And that, says Landa, is crucial for brand owners. It means an end to having to print with special colours and thanks to digital printing an end to inconsistency that creates waste. Even with PMS specifications there is always some variability in what is printed in one location to another, from one day to another.
Other colour management and control methods demand highly organised operations with strong procedural control to stay on top of their presses. There are equally strong benefits for packaging printers who will not longer need to wash down to change a special colour between jobs.
In the development labs in Israel a test rig is set up to transfer the Landa printed image to a sheet of any material, including some that could never be fed through a sheetfed press. There is no difference in any of the images. On a plastic film, a standard inkjet result would include some spreading of the ink, on an uncoated paper, ink must soak into the paper and deaden the image. This does not happen with nanography.
The nanographic process transfers a fully dried film to the paper, adhering to its surface through a hot-melt-like carrier layer. Once the colour is approved it should be almost impossible to alter. This will be a clincher for brand owners. Presses across the world should match each other’s output.
“One of the world’s largest brand owners contacted us after the last Drupa,” says Landa. “We met with their teams including those involved in product marketing and purchasing. We explained that all relevant colours will be specified in the digital colour space across the supply chain. With closed loop colour we can guarantee what the colour will be with only very small deviations. Brand owners are very, very receptive to the idea that they can replace all the spot colours that they need to manage thanks to the digital colour space.”
When nanographic machines reach users, a lot of the market priming will have been done. It is not just printing companies that are eagerly waiting for the technology. Over the next few months, and following feedback from Drupa no doubt, the business model and costing will have been sorted. The presses are meant to run round around the clock. The sheet handling and press base have no difficulty doing this thanks to a Komori heritage.
The printing technology will also need to be up to the job. There is no plan to stop the press to clean the Fujifilm Samba print heads between jobs. Instead each nozzle will be fired at intervals to keep it clear. The small size of the droplets fired in this spitting process means they are only visible under strong magnification.
The best sequence for firing nozzles and doing so in white space or in images so that they are not noticeable is something that will continue to be worked on, likewise how to keep nozzles clear if printing on smaller format sheets.
It is one of the small details that must be dealt with before the press is released into the industrial print world. The evidence is that Lands is attending to them. The operator’s cockpit was initially intended to have a holder for a cup of coffee, a nice touch to humanise the working environment. But that has had to go. “It might be counter cultural for those businesses that do not allow operators to drink at the machine,” says Benny Landa. Not even the smallest detail can be allowed to get in the way.
Benny Landa is being cautious about the launch of the first nanographic press. But he has identified the printers who will receive the first beta machines at the start of next year.
