Promail is targeting legacy continuous inkjet printheads on mailing lines with a piezo inkjet solution from US developer MCS. This is the Hayabusa, a mono printhead that is successor to its own Eagle printhead.
“The Hayabusa is built on a decade of success that we’ve had with the Eagle inkjet product line,” says MCS international sales director Kevin Loos. “Imprinting at speeds of 200m/min or greater has been dominated by continuous inkjet technologies and we saw an opportunity to introduce an alternative that can bring the reliability and ease of maintenance of piezo printheads to this area.”
The unit uses Kyocera printheads to reach 600dpi native resolution and a production speed of 305m/min running water based inks from IJPDS or PDF workflows. A single controller can manage up to eight modules, which come in 108mm- and 216mm-wide modules.
As well as mailing lines the Hayabusa unit is aiming at other web press applications where variable data is needed, increasing speed with a more flexible and simpler approach than is possible with legacy technology. “We worked with high volume printers to design the Hayabusa. They required a solution that reduced down time and can be ready to print on demand,” says Loos.
“There are two client categories that we target with the Hayabusa. First are the clients with high monochrome print volumes using continuous toner systems from Océ or Nipson. Our Hayabusa system offers these clients three value propositions: a lower imaging cost (up to 95% less) with no click cost, higher uptime thanks to low maintenance inkjet, and much higher throughput on one machine.
“We construct our own web tower to mount the Hayabusa to offer a complete turnkey solution for these applications.
“The second category is hybrid printers currently using Kodak inline with their web presses or finishing lines for direct mail manufacturing or lottery printing. We developed the Hayabusa to respond to a skilled maintenance labour shortage and a demand from customers looking for alternatives to ageing continuous inkjet technology.”
This includes companies with applications using personalised print for security and identity applications, forms and opportunities in labels and packaging. Working with MCS sister company Think Ink, MICR and invisible inks for security print are also available.
