26 April / May 2023 - Issue 246 www.signlink.co.uk UNDER THE HOOD / MIMAKI’S 330 SERIES ▲ The CJV330160 has a cutter station which can produce cut images to within 0.2mm of repeatable accuracy It goes without saying that Mimaki is well known with print businesses which have established a well-proven reputation in the market for a wide range of printing applications. It is very easy when you are in such a position to rest on your laurels and fail to notice competition slowly improving until they overtake your market-leading position. Before you know where you are, orders are failing to come in and you then have to play catch up which is not the best place to be. Mimaki has not been that complacent. The company has developed and released a new range of printers with the philosophy of ‘Loved, Evolved, Developed’ underpinning the development, and when you look in detail at each of the machines, you easily see how this tagline is a clear identifier for the changes. The generation step of the new 330 series of machines takes the three original wide-format solvent printers and upgrades both capacity and quality. The range is made up of two solvent printers, one with an in-built cutter and a dye-sublimation printer; the series being JV330-160 and the CJV330-160 (with cutter), plus the dye-sublimation TS330-1600. All of the machines have undergone an in-depth design review of the architecture of the printer’s chassis and this has resulted in the new machines being 230% more rigid than the original 300 series. Stronger materials have been used in key areas identified in the review and new materials being placed into the chassis to improve flatness. This obviously feeds into the 330 series of machines being able to place the dots onto the substrate with significantly more accuracy and repeatability. You do not need to be a design engineer to know that this means the 330 series of printers are able to print to much higher standards than the 300 series. Mimaki does not rely on you looking at its printed product to see if these changes have made a difference, the company actually measures it. If you were to look at a set of dots printed on the two machines, the 330 series of printers can control the dot landing accuracy in the X-Y direction to within 4µm and 20µm respectively compared to 26µm and 35µm with the 300 series of older printers. The updating of the chassis is not the only major update, the second and most important is the printer head nozzle design. The new 330 series now has a nozzle row length up from 25.4mm to 33.8mm meaning there is a greater area for deploying ink onto the substrate. Furthermore, the new heads are staggered with a new pattern for each channel. The 330 series now has four pairs of channels in the nozzle head rather than eight single channels. Each being a cluster of magenta/cyan and yellow/black on one side of the head with the mirror of this configuration being on the other. Proven technology As you would expect, and with the ethos of the 330 series being ‘Loved, Evolved, Developed’, it is of no surprise to see Mimaki continue to utilise its very successful ink deployment and machine management technology. The first being a Dot Adjustment System (DAS) which has been designed by Mimaki to automate the placement of the dot depending on the media and printing conditions. The idea being that the DAS reduces the input needed by the operator and reduction in streaking for overlaid inks, lack of image definition, and the avoidance of white streaking across the sheet. Ink deployment is enhanced by a key Mimaki tool called Mimaki Advanced Pass System (MAPS4). MAPS4 disperses the ink pattern on the sheet in a very specific way to allow the even drying of the product. Further to MAPS4, the eco-solvent inks used in the 330 series printers come equipped with Mimaki’s Waveform Control Mimaki has gone back to review its 300 series of printers and the result is the new 330 series with some stunning increases in capacity and quality. Brian Sims takes a closer look at the range The generation step of the new 330 series of machines takes the three original wide-format printers and upgrades both capacity and quality Loved, Evolved, Developed
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