IJI Advances Digital Wallpaper Printing
- Published: February 01, 2017
SWAVESEY, CAMBRIDGESHIRE, UK | Industrial Inkjet Ltd. (IIJ), supplier of systems for industrial inkjet printing, recently unveiled a method that reportedly allows companies to print wallpaper digitally at full production linear speeds to 70 mpm.
For the past 18 months, IIJ and Konica Minolta Industrial Inkjet have been working on a solution that can compete with conventional printing methods on both productivity and cost-per-roll. IJI says printing of wallpaper using inkjet is common, but speeds tend to be very low, and the technology is restricted to short-run “special” applications such as mural walls.
“The big demand from the wallpaper industry is for digital printing of wallpaper at full production speeds,” says IIJ managing director John Corrall. “Our view is that wallpaper printing is about to see a massive shift to digital technology, thanks to the improvements in inkjet capability. Ink performance and cost, print width, and speed are all now within reach. When we started, the main difficulty was in developing an ink that meets all of the requirements from the wallpaper industry. It’s not just the appearance, the ink has to work on a very wide range of common wallpaper media and it has to meet standards for emissions and wash and scrub tests.”
A video can be seen at this link.