Screen Printing - December 2017/January 2018 - 33

the key partners brought in for the project were Metronic, a
German manufacturer of roll-to-roll systems for flexo printing that built the substrate transport system, and the UK firm
Cambridge Consultants, which worked on the printhead array
(known as the Single Pass Inkjet Color Engine, or SPICE).
Barco, in addition to integrating the project, developed the
front end technology including the RIP.
Ambitiously, the partners set out to unveil their new singlepass technology at drupa 2000, then only 25 months away.
"The schedule was quite compressed," remembers Will Eve,
who worked for Cambridge Consultants then and led the project. (He's now director of technology for Inca Digital Printers.)
"It was all quite new. We could see that it should be possible to
put together wide systems using multiple printheads, and we
knew that drop on demand was much simpler than continuous
inkjet. What, as they say, could possibly go wrong?"
Well, a lot of things. The team would soon encounter the
formidable hurdles to single-pass printing that continue to
challenge inkjet developers to this day, not least of which is
banding. It turned out that drop-on-demand machines used
traversing heads for a reason: Without the redundancy of
those overlapping passes, defects from clogged nozzles or
printheads that weren't uniform or in perfect alignment with
one another were glaringly apparent. Other challenges included keeping the ink stable at such rapid deposition speeds and
understanding the drop-on-drop interactions after jetting.
"I think we were all quite naïve and had expectations of
how it was all going to come together quickly. We wildly
underestimated how hard it would be. And that's just as well,"
Eve says, laughing, "because we never would have started if
we had known."
Then, just weeks before the show, the team learned that
the printheads it had planned to use in the system would not
be available in time. "The drupa timeline was under severe
pressure, so we decided to combine two Xaar 500 binary
heads together in one cartridge," Haak explains. "After initial
testing with one color, we moved on to a CMYK version that
was narrower than we had planned because we wanted to be
ready for the drupa 2000 technology demonstration."

Eve remembers preparations going literally down to the
wire. "The machines were delivered to drupa without the
printheads - and that wasn't a precaution of any kind. It was
because we didn't have the printheads," he says. "We only got
delivery of the printheads during the [setup] of the show, so
that was fairly panicky. When they finally did arrive, we put
them in and got things working. It was miraculous, really."
The printer, renamed the Dot Factory (quirkily spelled
"the.factory"), was one of the most talked-about technologies at the show, even though the demonstration fell short of
Haak's expectations. The speed and width were just fractions of what he had hoped. "Finally, we were jetting UV inks
on different industrial substrates in a single pass, but the
speed was limited. Due to inkflow issues, we could only run
between 5 to 10 meters a minute at 14 centimeters wide."

TAKE HEED OF THE TIMES
With the positive reception at drupa behind them, the team set
out to refine the.factory in preparation for a formal product
launch at IPEX 2002. The printer would be offered in four- and
six-color versions in widths up to 24.8 inches and with a maximum print speed of 79 linear feet per minute, or about 10,000
square feet per hour - a speed unheard of at that time. It used
300-dpi, eight-level grayscale printheads from Toshiba. The
transport system featured a web-tension roller designed to
accommodate a range of substrate thicknesses; the nitrogen
UV curing system enhanced adhesion to plastics to address a
greater range of applications. Underscoring this versatility, the
first beta placement was at the Belgian company Chiyoda, a
manufacturer of laminated flooring and other décor products
that planned to use the.factory for proofs, samples, and shortrun customized work. In late 2001, Barco decided to spin
off the digital printing division as a separate company called
Dotrix, with Haak as the president and CEO.
Following IPEX, Haak remembers a steady stream of potential buyers coming to the Dotrix facility to test the machine for
a wide range of applications - laminates, sports equipment,
packaging, folding cartons, plastic tubes, and more. "Our demo
unit was running day and night to accommodate the specific

Just under the wire, the.factory [left] was demonstrated at drupa 2000 with a commercial launch two years later. The touch-screen control
panel [center] was designed with a simple user interface; high-capacity ink reservoirs [right] allowed for continuous operation.

DECEMBER 2017 / JANUARY 2018

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Screen Printing - December 2017/January 2018