Canon’s new UVgel ink facility comes fully on line

Canon has opened a new central ink production facility for UVgel ink after production volumes of the ink for its roll-to-roll Colorado printer family doubled over the last year. Canon has confirmed that the new facility - based on its innovation and development campus in Venlo, Netherlands - became fully operational on 1 December.

In 2019 Canon completed more than 1,200 installations of its UVgel Colorado large format printer series. Dirk Brouns, vice president large format graphics at Canon production printing, said: “Our customers are printing more and more with their Colorado devices, with average volumes worldwide already exceeding 15,000 m2 per year. And we expect to see these volumes continue to grow. Some of our top-performing customers are even surpassing annual production volumes of 100,000 m2. With our new ink factory, we can continue to supply our customers and partners with high-quality UVgel inks and support growing print volumes in the field, both today and in the future.” The new ink production centre processes raw ingredients in multiple steps and in barrels of 200 litres for each colour. At the end of the automated production line, the ink is transferred into Canon UVgel ink bottles, ready for shipment to the user. “We’ve been able to double our ink production in less than a year and our operations team is eager to continue to help our customers confidently print growing volumes of large format roll-to-roll graphics. At the same time, our new facility has been designed to be as environmentally friendly as possible. With a focus on operational efficiencies, the facility is delivering increased energy savings by reusing cooling capacity from other production plants on our campus and using a heat exchange unit to warm the cool air coming into the building with the heat of the air leaving the production hall,” said Rob Puts, vice president manufacturing and logistics at Canon production printing.