Special Drupa Coverage — Drupa Foretells Digital Future

All printing solutions to some degree can be characterized as application specific. Or, to put it another way, have limits on the type of work they can acceptably produce. Ink-jet takes product segmentation to a new level, though.

The fact that a device uses continuous vs. drop-on-demand (DOD) ink-jet heads, and thermal vs. piezo-electric in the latter case, doesn’t necessarily say all that much about its capabilities. Use of water-, pigment- or UV-based ink is a little more telling, but not always determinative. Combined, they do have a bearing on the types of substrates that can be printed, production speeds, print quality and total cost per piece, all of which factor into suitability for a given application.