Sun's New Inkjet Printers For CD and DVD Market

The development of a single pass UV inkjet printer for CD and DVD duplicating companies is seeing Sun Chemical extend its reach in to the inkjet printing systems market.

Sun Chemical has just announced details of Project 37D, which it said it designed to offer an affordable digital system for the decoration of optical discs.

According to the company, Project 37D complements its sister product, Project 37, which was launched in June 2006 to provide a similar digital printing capability for higher-volume disc replicators.

However, the new version has been engineered to be more compact and economical to meet the requirements of the duplicating industry.

As well as offering a claimed low cost per disc at EUR0.015 per unit, or lower, depending on image design, Project 37D is claimed to be at least three times faster than its nearest inkjet competitor at high resolution, according to Robin McMillan, Sun Chemical's marketing manager for industrial inks.

He said that the machine's set-up process takes only a few seconds between jobs, making Project 37D capable of achieving the profitable printing of up to 1,000 discs per hour.

Once printed and cured, Sun Chemical UV inkjet inks provide a durable, high-gloss finish and are resistant to humidity or ambient conditions.

They do not require any post-press processing, such as varnishing.

McMillan explained: "In addition to being much faster than competitors' systems, this further enhancement to the Project 37 range demonstrates our commitment to the evolving requirements of this growing marketplace, which is responsible for printing an estimated 17 billion discs each year.

It offers disc decorators the option of producing both short and long runs profitably, whilst enhancing the range of services they offer to customers." Project 37D is claimed to achieve an apparent resolution of 800 dots per inch (dpi) using eight levels of greyscale.

The system has a footprint of 2,600mm x 990mm x 1,600mm, so it can be installed in an office or digital pre-press operation.

It incorporates a fixed inkjet array using Xaar's Omnidot piezoelectric, drop-on-demand heads.

T he Project 37D system is also said by Sun Chemical to negate the need for more complex screen printing and associated pre-press processes.

It uses pre-coated white recordable discs that are loaded on to high-capacity spindles and the bespoke RIP and colour management technology offers photo-like print quality, minimal ink usage, right first time image reproduction and ease of use.

Both Project 37D and the larger Project 37 inkjet printers have been developed by Sun Chemical in association with Cambridge-based manufacturer Copytrax Technologies.

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