Mutoh XpertJet 1682UR: Colour, Layer on Layer

When you start to look for a replacement UV LED wide-format printer, there are a long list of suppliers who can provide the solution you seek. There are the flagship names which have for a long time taken the lead in both sales and technology, but as we start to move deeper in the 2000’s there are a number of companies that may not immediately be on your list, yet have racked up both experience and reputation.

One of these companies is Mutoh, a Japanese manufacturer which has been providing high-quality and cutting-edge printers for over seventy years. Mutoh Europe, based in Oostende, Belgium, has been capably placed to provide support to EMEA clients and users.

The list of digital printers available from Mutoh is both long and wide – whether it is LED UV, water-based UV, dye sublimation, or all types of sign and banner printing, they will have a high quality printer to suit your requirements.

We choose to look a little deeper into the recent addition of the Mutoh XpertJet 1682UR which is the result of a root and branch review of the successful ValueJet 1638UR.

This new machine has a number of updated and new features making it both quicker and more capable of providing wider and richer printed products.

The machine is a reel fed digital printer reaching up to 1625mm in width, with a maximum printable width of 1615mm which can be used to print a number of products from signage, product mock ups, POD materials, and virtually any output you can think of from a reel.

Providing the Colour

The method of producing deep and rich coloured products is centred on a printhead with two eight channels of staggered nozzles, each containing 1440 heads. The combination of channels and nozzles can be configured to produce a variation of ink laydown.

You can request the XpertJet 1682UR to produce CYMK on both tracks giving you the four process colours twice and this will deploy at up to 26.5m2/hr; the highest of production levels from the printer. You can also print with a combination of white ink and varnish, being five colours including white or up to six being the process set, white plus the varnish.

This combination of colours and varnish gives an almost limitless combination of product when printing on clear, white, black, or front or back lit substrates. But what Mutoh would say gives them the extra component in the quality scale is the ability of the XpertJet 1682UR to print up to five levels in one pass.
Colour lay down can be varied due to the 1440 nozzles being doubled into two banks each containing eight channels. This means you can have a combination of two times CMYK, a five-colour set up using CMYK, plus a white ink and a six colour set up can be achieved with the inclusion of a varnish.

As you would expect, the XpertJet 1682UR comes with easy to change ink cartridges, each filled with US61 ink which can reach the most stringent of EU controls for environmental concerns. The inks are developed to give up to 200% elongation with reduced stickiness post curing as well as excellent adhesion and scratch resistance. There should be no concerns over the pigments contained in the white ink, as you would expect, the XpertJet 1682UR has a system to ensure the ink is agitated to avoid settlement.

The machine is a reel fed digital printer reaching up to 1625mm in width, with a maximum printable width of 1615mm

This all means not only is the printer highly productive; it means you eliminate the need for substrate pull-back which is a massive upside when producing an impeccable level of print. Aside from quality, should you change the combination of layering itself, you can change the type of output from the machine.

Application and variation of colour is only as good as the level of nozzles available. Whilst the colour outcome is adjusted with the use of variable droplet technology, the maintenance of the nozzles is accomplished on the XpertJet 1682UR by the use of what Mutoh call Nozzle Area Select.

The purpose of this function is to only use the nozzles that are clear and ready to use to their fullest affect. The automated nozzle checking unit cleans and attempts to reinstate any blocked nozzles, but if this is not possible, Nozzle Area Select takes over.

A second automated system to ensure top quality performance is the ability of the machines to check and adjust the actual positioning of the dot. You need to bear in mind the dot is being fired from each direction depending on the pass the head is making.

If you take a centre line, the true position of the dot placement, regardless of the direction of travel of the printhead, the dot could be fired and either land short of the centre line or over shoot it. Likewise, when the head comes from the other direction, the same problem occurs.

From a point of view of bi-directional, single pass printing, this is not an issue, but with one of the USP’s of the XpertJet 1682UR being single pass multi-level printing, this has to be right. Mutoh have developed and automatic system for the bi-directional adjustment of the dot placement. The machine reads the printed material and then via the use of DropMaster 2, adjusts the landing of each droplet to the precise position required.

The final part in the puzzle of droplet placement is the method of which the media is fed to the machine. The printer again uses the data produced from reading the image that has been produced and using the Mutoh system called Automatic Media Feed Adjustment, makes the necessary corrections to the position of the substrate to ensure an almost perfect printed image.

Waste Not, Want Not

The XpertJet 1682UR is very focused on maximum effectiveness and this is not only limited to the ink. Mutoh have a clever device built into the printer called Media Tracker which cleverly tracks the media used and at the end of the production run prints a bar code on the leading edge of the unused reel to indicate what is left on the reel.

It might be a name that is not top of your list when looking for new printer, but you would be very remiss not to look at what is in fact becoming one of the industry leaders for digital inkjet printers.

Statistics

Web width 1625mm
Printable width 1615mm
Colours C/M/Y/K/Wh/Varnish
Production speed Up to 26.5m2/hr
Print head Two eight channel
monoblock 1440
nozzle heads
Resolution 1,200 dpi

Brian Sims Principal Consultant, Metis Print Consultancy, www.metis-uk.eu