Drupa 2012, the Inkjet Drupa…again? A closer look at Ricoh
By David Zwang
Published: January 10, 2012
Ricoh was founded in 1936 in Tokyo as Riken Sensitized paper, a company that manufactured photographic papers. As early as the 1980’s Ricoh began manufacturing copiers, fax machines and duplicators for many companies, including Pitney-Bowes, Toshiba, AT&T, Omnifax and AB Dick. Starting in the 1990’s, it began a string of acquisitions that included Savin, Gestetner, Lanier, Rex-Rotary, Monroe, Nashuatec, and the European operations of Danka. Additionally, Ricoh acquired IKON Office Solutions, Hitachi Printing Systems and IBM’s Printing Systems Division. This robust acquisition portfolio catapulted the company into being the printer manufacturer with the largest installed equipment footprint in the world. In 2011, Ricoh entered into a global strategic agreement with Heidelberg for its light production line. According to the press release, “This agreement enables Heidelberg to sell Ricoh’s latest color digital press, the Ricoh ProTM C901 Graphic Arts Edition - Ricoh`s high speed color digital press with Ricoh PxPTM Chemical toner, as well as appropriate future production printing offerings in Ricoh’s pipeline.”
In addition to the printer manufacturing business, Ricoh also retains and expands its roots in photography as evidenced by its recent acquisition of Pentax Image Systems.
While Ricoh has a significant production printing systems product line, in this article we will only be focusing on the Ricoh InfoPrint 5000 production inkjet printer and associated technologies.
The place to begin is with the fact that the InfoPrint 5000 family of presses is actually manufactured by Screen. These presses are ‘similar’ to the Screen Truepress Jet520 series of presses, but there are many Ricoh-designed differences in the available products. Ricoh has done a great deal of R&D on its own, and in conjunction with Screen, to enhance their respective machines as well as to tailor features and functions to better serve the Ricoh customer base. Furthermore, the size and scope of Ricoh, and the previous IBM branding, has enabled Ricoh to sell significantly more of the InfoPrint branded presses into the marketplace than Screen has been able to achieve. We will look at the Screen offering in a future article.
A primer on Ricoh InfoPrint Production Inkjet technology
At the center of the Ricoh inkjet technology is the Seiko Epson Micro Piezo drop on demand (DoD) printhead. Ricoh and Screen don’t publish this information, so I will give you what information I have been able to pull together through my own research. According to Seiko Epson, the piezo elements in these inkjet heads change shape according to the voltage applied, which enables precise control of ink drop size and ejection from the inkjet head. However, a piezo element by itself is not enough to facilitate the precise, even propulsion of the ink onto the media. They have found that through meniscus control it makes it possible for the piezo element to control the movement of the meniscus (the ink surface in the nozzle). This technology allows both high-precision impact point control and perfectly spherical dots and is a key element in the precise levels of ink ejection control characteristic of Micro Piezo Technology. The heads print at 2 bits per spot and offer stochastic screening, so the multi-drop technology is also able to generate extremely smooth gradations.
The inkjet heads are mounted in a single-pass multiple-head array. The distances between the inkjet heads for each color, as well as the distances from the inkjet heads to the substrate, are short, ensuring exceptional color-to-color registration.
The heads can print at up to 720 x 720 dpi, yielding an effective resolution of 1,440 dpi. The presses can support CMYK dye and pigment inks, as well as a MICR option. Ricoh has found that the life span of the heads is about 18 months regardless of hours of usage or whether you are using dye or pigment inks. This is attributed to the head’s unique and simple design.
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