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Dainippon Screen relaunches the Inca Spyder 150 to join the Inca Spyder 320, and Inca Columbia Turbo UV curable ink flatbed printers.

The placement of two sets of LED lamps on this printer will be identified in the update to the FLAAR Reports on this Inca Spyder 150 later this summer.

During 12 days inspecting printers at DRUPA ’04 trade show in Germany, the Inca Spyder 150 impressed me with its near-glossy surface finish, excellent rendition of reds, and generally photo-realistic quality.

But at this early date the booth personnel were very coy about how the semi-gloss was achieved.

But then the Inca Spyder 150 did not appear at the subsequent Photokina trade show in Cologne, in September, nor at SGIA trade show a few days later in Minneapolis. Or maybe I simply missed it in the shadow of the larger Inca Columbia Turbo?

So I can’t help but be curious why the Inca Spyder 150 has not been either at an Inca booth or a Sericol booth at recent trade shows since DRUPA ‘04?

Then the Inca Spyder 150 reappeared in the booth of Dainippon Screen at FESPA ’07. Dainippon Screen owns Inca Digital (Fujifilm owns Sericol ink that is used by all Inca printers currently).

Inca Spyder 150 at FESPA trade show 2007.

Although this remains one of my personal favorite printers, we don’t yet have adequate information on it. Since our information and documentation is more comprehensive on all the other flatbeds, the FLAAR Reports on all the other brands are more readily available. So for comparing prices, here is the range of reports that we have.

Inca Spyder 150, monitor.

LED lamps for curing UV ink

It turns out that this printer is among the few to use LED lights to cure the UV ink. The new Raster Printers Daytona T600UV flatbed is among the other rare examples. This is so new it is not yet proven.

The Luscher JetPrint tries to use LED lights to resolve problems in curing with mercury arc lamps (you would expect a good system in a $650,000 machine). But word on the street is that the LED lights have issues too (in part because the printer is simply too large and too new). Indeed the Luscher JetPrint has been temporarily withdrawn. It was missing at both ISA ’07 and FESPA ‘07 too.

So at present, the Inca Spyder 150 is the only wide-format UV printer that functions nicely with LED lamps both for pinning and for curing. FLAAR wrote a brief article on this for the official FESPA Daily News(paper), published by SIP.

The LED lamp system used by Sun NEO LED (from Russia , don’t confuse with Sun Chemical) does not have separate pinning and curing systems: it cures in one system. The question of course is, how effective is the cure? What about adhesion and abrasion issues?

With all the new models available at ISA and FESPA 2010, FLAAR is offering personalized consulting at each trade show. You can walk-the-floor with the Senior Editor of FLAAR and get his comments on any and all printers, inks, RIP software, color management, substrates, applications, etc. So if you wish to learn about the difference between combo, hybrid, and dedicated UV printers, how latex ink compares, about textile printers, etc. contact FLAAR to obtain consulting. You can also get consulting before ISA or FESPA anywhere in the world: Dr Hellmuth was in Dubai and India last week as consultant, and will be in Saudi Arabia, Singapore, and China as consultant in the next two months. He was consulting in Korea and London in late 2009.

That’s why we need to visit the Sun headquarters in Russia for tests, since we need to be present while these are undertaken.

FLAAR is preparing additional articles on LED lamps for UV inkjet curing, since clearly this is a major new frontier. By SGIA ’07, and at least by ISA ’08, FESPA Digital ’08, and DRUPA ’08, there will be many more UV printers with LED lamps. We are aware of research but are under NDA so can’t publish our information until these printers are revealed at these upcoming trade shows.

Gerber’s new Solara ion printer will take over what few sales the Inca Spyder had hopes for

Gerber is launching the most innovative new flatbed printer of the year (actually of the century so far). This is no guarantee that anything in the Gerber Solara ion printer actually functions, because everything is new. Everyone else who has tried cationic ink chemistry had painful failure and tremendous losses.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Most recently updated on October 10, 2007.

First posted November 2, 2004, Updated May 16, 2005 and April 11, 2007. Updated and switched from html to php on June 18, 2007.