This Mimaki hybrid printer promises the best of both worlds, handling both roll-fed and rigid materials with ease as Nessan Cleary finds out.
In the early days of UV printers hybrid devices did gain a poor reputation for quality with many manufacturers simply adapting existing roll-fed chassis as a quick, cheap way of getting to market. But Duncan Jefferies, marketing manager for Mimaki's UK distributor Hybrid Services, says that the UJV-160 has been designed from the ground up to be a hybrid device, noting: “Mimaki has an excellent reputation for build quality.”
He adds: “It's being used very successfully by customers who have opted for it primarily as a flatbed, or as a roll-fed machine, and giving them the opportunity to do extra work. Not everybody has the space or the budget for a true flatbed.”
The UJV-160 is a 1.6m wide device. It comes supplied with foldaway tables front and rear for rigid materials and will also handle roll-fed media. It uses normal pinch rollers on the printer itself supplemented by free-running rollers on the platen and the tables to transport the media through the machine. It accepts rolls up to 25kg and will take rigid materials up to 10mm thick and 12kg in weight, making it very suitable for foam core boards and thin dibond sheets.
It uses the same print engine and UV inks as the much more expensive JFX Plus flatbed printer and as such you can print very fine four-point text. Maximum resolution is 1200dpi with the machine running at 5m2/hr, though you can increase the speed to 7m2/hr but with the resolution falling to 600 x 900dpi, which is still perfectly acceptable for many applications.
It uses LED curing, which both helps to cut down on the overall power consumption of the device, and also makes it easier to handle some of the display foam boards, as well as PVC, which can be susceptible to heat damage from UV lamps. The UV LEDs are said to last for up to 5000 hours.
This is a five-colour machine, using CMYK plus white, but the white ink is used in two channels - which is a fairly common approach as it makes it quicker to flood coat an area in white.
There's a choice of two ink sets: hard inks which give very good rub resistance, making them suitable for a wide range of commercial work; and flexible inks, mainly developed for applications such as vehicle graphics. The hard inks, which give a particularly good colour gamut, do have a good deal of flexibility, but not to the degree of the flexible inks, which can stretch by up to 200%, providing the media is up to that.
Jefferies says that the inks will work with most non-porous substrates, including display boards and acrylics, and with primers available for more difficult surfaces such as glass. He also points out that having a degree of stretchiness makes it easier to crease and cut images without any danger that the image will suffer flaking at the edges of the cut.
The inks themselves are supplied in 600cc sacks in cardboard boxes, which is much more environmentally friendly than plastic. The printer comes with special 'Eco covers’ that hold the boxes in place in the device. It's a small step but Jefferies says that customers are increasingly asking about how they can improve their environmental footprint.
All in all, it’s a fairly solid looking machine which should be a welcome addition to many smaller bureaux. The choice of inks, along with the ability to handle a wide range of rigid and roll-fed media, makes it extremely flexible. It costs £39,995, which includes the printer, media tables and a year's warranty. Also included in the price is Mimaki’s PostScript Rip software, Rasterlink Pro 4, capable of 16-bit rendering, colour management, nesting and image editing. There’s also a roll-fed only version of the printer supplied without the tables for £30,995.