Saturn UV, the company formed by industry veterans David Pelling and Mike Piercy, is bringing Hoya’s LED UV technology to the UK.
Hoya is a 35,000-strong Japanese company with widespread interests, including optics and laser. It has become one of the largest players in LED UV technology in the country. It is now starting to spread into Europe, with dealers in Spain, Denmark and Germany as well as Saturn UV.
The key advantage of Hoya, Pelling says, is that the unit is completely air cooled. Other suppliers use water to keep temperature at the tip of the diode constant to optimise the energy generated. Hoya does the same without the need for pipes, ducting or fans that other approaches require.
The target for Saturn UV is, says Pelling, OEM manufacturers of flexo and inkjet presses wanting an LED unit to integrate into an inkjet label press or large format press. Saturn will also work through integrators with one-off projects that need LED UV.
“We are going head to head with Phoseon,” says Pelling. “But we see what we have today as the thin end of the wedge for Hoya, with other products coming down the line. We can sell into a manufacturer producing a standard press design or to a specialist integrator needing a solution for a particular project.”
This will include single-pass label printing and large format inkjet. Elsewhere, Hoya has systems fitted to sheetfed litho presses. “Hoya is the largest supplier of LED UV in Japan,” says Pelling. The standard diodes it supplies are tuned to 365mm and 395mm and with a power rating of 20w/m2.
What the future applications might be is unclear, but the clear expectation is that Hoya will be active in all areas of the LED UV sector, not just digital printing where the diodes come in compact 80mm widths.
