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Teckwin TeckThunder hybrid UV-curable flatbed printer

At Shanghai '07 trade show in July the Teckwin booth exhibited a hybrid printer that had not yet received a name. It had a grayscale variable droplet printhead, the Xaar 760.

At the Teckwin factory and demo room outside Shanghai, the President/CEO and new Teckwin managers from Europe and the US showed additional innovative UV printers.

Now some of these newer versions of Teckwin UV printers are appearing at trade shows outside China. At VISCOM Germany in September the Teckwin TeckThunder hybrid UV-curable flatbed printer was exhibited. They also had brochures on the flatbed Teckwin TeckStorm, a dedicated flatbed also with new Xaar variable droplet printheads.

Here is the Teckwin TeckThunder hybrid UV-curable flatbed printing samples. Slovenia, 2007.

Samples printed by the Teckwin TeckThunder hybrid UV-curable flatbed printer.

The brochure was by Tepede and sets a new level for sophistication in trade show brochures for a Chinese-made printer. Tepede is a known and respected company that has experience with many brands of wide-format inkjet printers going back many years. I have seen their booth at shows for at least the last seven years (since in those years I lived in Germany, attending DRUPA 2000 was easy, by tram from where I lived in Essen-Werden). Today attending DRUPA costs about $250 to $450 per person, per night (and the show is about 14 days long!).

Until we undertake a detailed evaluation with tests it is not appropriate to issue any comment on the printer other than that Teckwin is probably the first Chinese company whose printers will survive usability and durability tests. If you read the FLAAR Reports on the Infiniti hybrid UV printer (based on visiting two people who had the printer in their print shops; I visited each printshop more than once to check on progress, or in this case, to learn what else had broken down). FLAAR also has a site-visit case study of the DuPont Cromaprint 22uv, plus we have feedback on most of the other installations of that Flora-made printer elsewhere in the US. All the feedback is consistent about Flora-made printers (available in FLAAR Reports on the DuPont, on the Raster Printers and on the Flora itself).

But first feedback from one recent purchaser of the Teckwin hybrid suggest that it does not fall apart, break down, wear out in the first two, four, or six months. I asked the owner of a Teckwin Tecksmart 1600 UV in Russia about his experiences. He was attending a 2-day program I was giving in Novosibirsk (his Teckwin was over a thousand kilometers away elsewhere in Russia, so I could not visit to further document the installation).

Unfortunately in Guatemala the TeckSmart printers that arrived there did not survive shipment and the owner turned them back to the distributor. Distributors in the US prefer to offer the dedicated flatbed TeckStorm and not the hybrid TeckThunder or TeckSmart due to reliability and other minor issues with the hybrid system. But the factory is trying to improve their models.

In Slovenia Tepede kindly loaned a Teckwin TeckThunder for the local FESPA-sponsored Adriatic printer program so that FLAAR could have a printer available to show guests. This is the first time a UV printer has been loaned to a university for this kind of international lecture event. We thank Tepede for providing the printer for the FESPA+university+FLAAR-related program in Ljubljana.

Unfortunately even with two tech support engineers they could not get it running adequately after the first day (it operated acceptably occasionally but could not be gotten up and running fully). Since many of the issues with the TeckSmart in Guatemala were due to damage in shipment, my question is to what degree is the packaging, shipping a cause of subsequent issues? Or is the construction of the inside connections of the entire printer simply not holding up to the jostling of international shipment. Seemingly the flatbed does not have this issue as often.

But the fact that the TeckThunder did not appear at VISCOM Italy in November 2007 nor at Sign Istanbul a few weeks later has raised the question of why were these UV-curable hybrid flatbed printers absent. But at subsequent trade shows either the TeckThunder or the TeckSmart was indeed exbibited. There was a TeckSmart at Shanghai '09 in July 2009.

Most recently updated July 13, 2009.

First posted October 1, 2007. Updated December 3, 2007.