Epson officially launches its revolutionary PrecisionCore inkjet heads into the Australian market. Consumer and business printers are first out the gate showcasing the next generation, scalable thin film piezo technology, with production devices dropping locally later this year.
The launch went off in style at the Art Gallery of NSW, unveiling the first wave of products to use the new technology. The office devices came out gunning for the desktop laser market, boasting blistering print speeds, 50% lower printing costs and up to 70% lower energy costs. Also on show was a SureColor F2000 garment printer, the first of the commercial engines to debut in Australia.
Locally, Epson is set to roll out its production printers to market later this year, kicking off with the SurePress L-6034VW digital label press. Using the groundbreaking PrecisionCore heads the new press, which officially debuted at Labelexpo last year, can achieve a print speed of 15 metres per minute across a 34 cm wide web. Craig Heckenberg (pictured), business unit manager, Epson Australia, tells Print21 that word of the technology’s transformative capabilities is already sparking considerable attention from across the industry.
“The event tonight is the first in a line of launches for the PrecisionCore technology. There’s the retail equipment here now, and the commercial devices are just around the corner. That’s the thing about PrecisionCore, it’s completely scalable across Epson’s whole range of products, so from your everyday office printers, to the F2000 garment printer there, all the way up to the SurePress, you get the same high quality and the same speed,” said Heckenberg.
The launch event pitted the high-speed inkjet heads up against comparable laser technology. Energy use monitors were hooked up to an Epson WorkForce 3600 and a laser device, showing the power idle costs at around $8 annually for the PrecisionCore and around $37 for the laser. The PrecisionCore also printed a duplex B&W document before the laser had finished warming up, delivering comparable quality.
Work on the technology has been the defining development project for Epson, championed by the company’s president Minoru Usui. The result of many years and over half a billion dollars spent in R&D, PrecisionCore offers piezo crystal films of just one micron thick – one-hundredth the thickness of a human hair. This enables three times the print nozzle density, delivering the high levels of precision and accuracy necessary for fine detail work. The piezo elements are able to fire nearly 50,000 times per second, precisely controlling drop size from 1.5 picolitres up to 32.5 picolitres.
According to Usui, “PrecisionCore represents a leap forward in printing performance. We continue to deliver outstanding quality thanks to superior dot control, and have introduced an original new system to ensure reliability. At the same time, scalability allows us to fully leverage our historical strengths of ink flexibility and print head durability.”
For a more in-depth look into Epson's PrecisionCore revolution click here, or you can check out the cover story in Print21's February issue.
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