Industrial Inkjet Printers

Industrial Inkjet Printers

Industrial inkjets allow printing on a broader range of materials as compared to home printers. In addition to a variety of papers, these marking systems can be formatted to print on plastics, glass, textiles, acrylic and metals. They can also be used for the printing of labels and packaging for the purposes of product identification. An alternative to pad or screen printing, industries such as graphic arts, photography, mapping, CAD or engineering and decorative materials production utilize industrial inkjet printers for products such as ID cards as well as printing large volume documents and part marking. Compared to dot matrix and daisywheel printers, these devices are significantly quieter and can print finer smoother details with higher resolution. Along with printer resolution, measured in dots per inch (dpi), printing width, memory, maximum media width, thickness and length should be considered when selecting the proper industrial inkjet printer for a given application.

As aforementioned, industrial inkjet printers use spray nozzles to project ink onto a given surface in order to reproduce a digital image. Thermal bubble and piezoelectric are the two distinct methods used to create the final product. In thermal bubble or bubblejet printing, resistors create heat which in turn develops a bubble within the ink cartridge. As the bubble expands, ink is forced out through the nozzle and onto the print material. Piezoelectric printers use an electric current to vibrate small crystals within the nozzle in order to push ink out. The ink droplets produced in peizoelectric printing systems are significantly smaller than thermal bubble ink drops and therefore allow greater control over image quality. Nevertheless thermal bubble inkjet printers are more common as piezoelectric technology is patented and produced solely by Epson. In addition to the choice of printing technique, there are several optional features to be had in an industrial inkjet printer. Warm air chambers and UV curing dry and protect prints, CD-ROM drives may be installed directly in the printer and monitors and automatic turn off give operators better control and warn when materials are low. Color printing, copying and sorting capabilities, continuous flow, protective metal housing and cutters are also available on many industrial inkjet printer models.