Color Gamut of UV inks
Water-based ink has one color gamut; solvent inks are close, and generally rather good. But UV ink has a unique color gamut, especially in reds, oranges, pinks, yellows, and greens. So you might wish to order the FLAAR Report on UV ink to learn which colors do not print well.
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Octopus II ink containers UV printer |
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What about Longevity?
With water-based ink Epson was criticized for having fast-fade inks years ago. Now Epson inks are better (just realize that all those claims for 200 years longevity are for storage in a drawer in a darkened room; hardly a realistic longevity test). But no ink is truly archival.
There has been no outcry from print providers to pressure chemistry companies to provide more longevity. The main issue is to make the awful odor of two brands of UV ink go away.
Eco-UV ink
Roland and Mimaki are both claiming their UV inks are eco! Sorry, no UV cured ink is ecological whatsoever, not even if cured with LED lamps. Indeed one or two brands of UV-cured ink may contain R40 and R43 chemicals. An ink chemist told me that at least one Japanese UV ink is not even allowed to be used in the US and probably not in Europe. The new REACH regulations in Europe will further impact the chemistry of UV ink.
Prices of UV Inks, per liter
FLAAR provides one of the few tabulations of price-per-liter of UV inks. In some cases it’s not easy to obtain this kind of information. We have taken what is possible to learn about UV ink and put them into this short report. The price for this FLAAR Report is about comparable to two liters of UV ink.
Continuous UV inkjet ink
FLAAR tends not to cover label printing nor continuous inkjet printers, so we do not evaluate ink from Linx Printing. FLAAR concentrates on wide-format DOD inkjet chemistries and technologies.
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Durst Rho 320 color test chart, Viscom Italy 2008. |
Hybrid UV inkjet ink
There are now new hybrid UV inkjet inks, which do not have curing lamps on the printhead carriage. Aellora was the best known for one kind of hybrid UV ink about five years ago. Now a company in Switzerland is offering a different hybrid UV ink for printing on fabrics.
Cationic UV ink
100% of the analysts, myself included, and 90% of the ink chemists I spoke with felt that cationic ink would not work. Then I had the opportunity to spend several hours discussing cationic UV ink chemistry and curing with the head scientist of Gerber Scientific. The next day it was possible to test cationic UV ink in the demo room of the factory of Gerber Scientific in Connecticut.
Not only did the UV ink work in the Gerber Solara ion, the prints were attractive, albeit grainy because of the 42 picoliter printhead. Although there is still skepticism in the industry, Gerber chemists and managers have demonstrated that if you devote enough resources to any problem, you can generally find a work-around for issues.
I discuss the pros and cons of cationic ink in the separate FLAAR Report on UV inks. This report is for printshop owners, managers, printer operators, as well as manufacturers. But it is not a technical report on chemistry per se whatsoever. I discuss mainly the marketing reality and the major issues of some of the well known brands: for example, which big brand of UV ink is not able to print well on Coroplast; which ink flakes off Sintra when the Sintra is cut?
If you are about to invest in a UV printer, you might want to know these things. People at a trade show are unlikely to mention these issues with UV inks.
Fortunately most UV inks work okay, but you do need to read the facts to have a reality check.
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UV printer Durst Rho ink containers |
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UV printer NeoPlus ink containers |
First posted November 24, 2008.
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We are adding new pages and new features every month so it is not always realistic to update old pages from past years. All the old equipment is still available on eBay, so we keep even our old pages. If you wish only the more up to date product reviews, these are in PDFs (not in the web pages, but in PDFs which are linked in the columns at the right of every page). Please realize that we tend to update a page (or a PDF) primarily when it is clear that our readers ask about this brand or model frequently. With over 45 brands of UV printers and over 200 models in the past ten years, it is not realistic to update pages on obsolete brands or unpopular models. If you prefer to speak with Nicholas Hellmuth in person about a printer, you can bring him to your company anywhere in the world as consultant. By later in 2012 more of our web sites will be in 36 different languages with instant translation (and better than old fashioned web page translators of several years ago). So far all the languages are available on www.FLAAR.org and www.3d-scanners-3d-software-reviews.org. Next will be our www.large-format-printers.org. |
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