Melony Rocque-Hewitt looks at how this printer could grow with your business.
It is nearly two years ago now that Agfa completed its purchase of Gandi Innovations. The sale allowed Agfa to plug an obvious hole in its hardware arsenal, and since then, the company has bought two machines to market, the development of which was well-established by Gandi and then picked up and completed by Agfa.
The first of these machines was the Agfa Jeti 1224 UV HDC which was first announced at Ipex in May 2010 and started shipping three months later.
The machine that we’re interested in here, the Agfa Jeti 3020 Titan was shown at SGIA in the autumn of 2010, but has taken somewhat of a scenic route to market. However, that said, shipping commenced in September this year, with the first UK install going to Hull-based SignsDisplay.com (see box out below).
The Jeti 3020 Titan has been engineered (and marketed) as a heroic beast of burden designed to work on a 24/7 basis. A UV machine with a 3.2m wide, true flatbed architecture vacuum table, it sports Spectra printheads (although whilst in development under Gandi Innovations, along with the 1214 UV HDC, it began life with Gen 4 Ricoh heads).
Marketing literature describes it as ‘future proof’ and this is because it is characterised by an agile scalability, which means as your business grows, so too, can the engine that powers it. The useful thing here is that all this can be done retrospectively, out in the field. (Previously this scalability, was only available on the Agfa M-Press machines).
Think of the 3020 Titan not as a single unit but a ladder-like configuration starting off with a 16-head unit delivering 101m2/hr, and then ascending the rungs you can add white, light colours, orange and more CMYK heads. On the top rung, you’re in the company of 48-heads delivering print at 195m2/hr.
These heads are jetting 8pl variable dot grey scale, at a native 600dpi but can also deliver 1200dpi for photorealistic image quality. Fine text is delivered at 4pt positive and negative.
These days quantifiable housekeeping has become all the rage, with efficient ink consumption an important consideration. The 3020 utilises Agfa’s highly-pigmented Anuvia UV curable inks, and thanks to a generous wide gamut and a thin lay-down, the machine uses about 7ml per square metre.
The 3020 offers a flatbed-to-roll option, handling roll weights of up to 113kilo and 320cm wide, so users can buy media more economically and compete in more markets.
The flatbed has a maximum print area 310cm x 200cm, and has retractable registration pins to ensure accurate media positioning. It can also cope with three 61 x 41 boards, side-by -side, simultaneously and thicknesses of up to 5cm.
Titan Postscript
One of the highlights of the Jeti 3020 Titan is its GUI (Graphical User Interface). Once files are Ripped, jobs can be nested and scaled on the machine rather than in the Rip.
A 16 head system starts at £220,000 while the 48-head version comes in at £340,000.
In terms of installations Agfa is hoping that there will be another two installs by the end of 2012 in the UK.
We’ve heard whisper that in the early part of 2013, we might well see a new smaller model with a 1.5 x 3m bed size able to handle 5 x 10ft boards.
Agfa sees EFI and Durst as the main manufacturing competitors to its 3020 machine.
We liked it so we bought it
Hull printer SignsDisplay.com (shown above) was the first UK PSP to take delivery of an Agfa Jeti Titan UV-curable printer. "We chose it for a number of reasons," said managing director Mike Hitchman. "Firstly, for its size - it has a print area of 3 x 2m; then for its productivity - outputting quality prints at almost 200m2/hr.
"We opted for the 36 printhead version - 32 printing colour plus four white - but in the future we have the option to upgrade the machine’s performance if we feel it is necessary. We could also increase the number of printheads to 40 or even 48 when required.
"I am delighted to have the Titan on board," said Hitchman. "The installation has gone very smoothly and the printer was up and running in just a couple of days. Agfa has shown that they understand our business and I look forward to building a long-term relationship with them."