Rotomail last week opened its Milan factory to printers from across Europe, including a contingent from the UK, to show off the first HP PageWide T490 – the first press to use the HDNA printhead.
This is the printhead that adds a light droplet weight to the standard nozzle size, giving 2,400 nozzles per inch. This enables the technology to add intermediate steps in the colour range that HP’s thermal inkjet can produce, smoothing transitions, reducing artefacts and expanding the colours that are reproducible. Instead of three options per pixel, the additional droplets provide the equivalent of seven droplet sizes per image spot.
At the same time the press includes options for priming to prepare paper ahead of printing, either inline or offline to supply multiple presses, and to include a post print coating using technology from Epic, to produce the equivalent of a web offset look and feel.
The aim is to increase the range of applications that the inkjet technology can address beyond mono books, transactional and some direct mail printing into catalogues, point of sale and magazines.
Rotomail has linked with the publisher of Paris Match to print back issues of the popular magazine on demand. Samples on display last week were on uncoated papers with an Indigo cover which suffered on direct comparison to the heatset web offset version used for each week’s issue. However, offset cannot print old issues and it is early days for the project. The back issues are sold as special occasion gifts, to mark birthdays and anniversaries for example.
Post print coating would improve the look, for example. Epic had samples produced in the US with its coating applied and this lifts the colour significantly to the sort of quality that would be acceptable for certain styles of magazine.
The surprise, however, was the use of the PageWide T490 press to produce point of sale banners. This is enabled thanks to a 2,740mm image frame, expanding what can be printed beyond book and transactional pages. This ability is a key part of the corrugated application developed using the PageWide technology and applied more generally. This capability has existed on the PageWide press developed for corrugated printing.
HP points out that others can move to the HDNA technology as a retrofit upgrade. The head is now available for the T400 series and will be available for the narrower T230 machines in December. Rotomail’s press started as a standard PageWide T410, upgraded to T480 status before fitting the new print heads at the end of last year when it became the beta site.
Rotomail chief executive Giovanni Antonuzzo says that the press is in full operation and is the culmination of a journey started 20 years when the Milan company started to look at the potential for inkjet. Its first experience, with an early Kodak Versamark “was like driving a Ferrari without brakes”. The experience has improved as knowledge of inkjet has grown.
Ten years ago, Rotomail started to look at diversification into book printing, leading in 2010 to the purchase of a first HP machine. “Now we have 20 production lines,” he says. These include a PageWide T230, two Indigo W7200s and Xeikon 3500 as webfed digital presses and Xerox and HP Indigo cutsheet machines.
“With the T490 HD we can reach very high quality on the right medium. Already one customer we showed samples to could not tell the difference between this and offset – and we expect we expect quality to get better.”
Executives and models combine to show off the capabilities of the HNDA equipped HP PageWide T490 at Rotomail in Milan. The press will open up opportunities in magazines, catalogues and point of sale thanks to being able to print banners longer than 2.4 metres.
