• Cost-effective: No warm-up cycle and no down time
• Easy to use: No special training required to operate and maintain thermal inkjet printers
• Fast: Hundreds of tiny nozzles firing at High frequency allows high-quality printing at high speeds
• Reliable: TIJ is less sensitive to air bubbles in the firing chamber than other printing technologies, avoiding print quality problems and delays caused by trapped air
• Flexible: Supports a wide variety of media
• High quality: TIJ places smaller drops more accurately, producing consistenly superb image and text quality
• Environmentally safe: With thermal inkjet, there is no need for service technicians qualified to handle volatile solvents, and no noxious fumes
• Lower cost of ownership: A thermal inkjet printer can cost much less than other printing equipment, reducing the market entry cost

Our selection of Xaar Piezo Inkjet printers makes it possible to find a solution for most of your printing tasks. We offer piezo inkjet printers based on Xaar technology. The piezo printers are available in a variety of print heights and configurations. Our equipment prints with oil- or solvent-based inks. In operation, a piezo printer with oil ink requires very little maintenance. The piezo printers are widely used in the packaging industry, but is also a good choice for other industries, such as the mailing industry.

Controllers, which can be used in combination with our Xaar printers:

• CU (Controller Unit)
• CB (Controller Board)
• TIPC (Touch Industrial Printer Controller)
• IPC (Industrial Printer Controller)
• OPC / RPC (Office and Industrial rack mounted with CB's)

See our HP and XAAR product categories.

The continuous ink jet method is used commercially for marking and coding of products and packages. The idea was first patented in 1867, by Lord Kelvin and the first commercial devices (medical strip chart recorders) were introduced in 1951 by Siemens.

In continuous inkjet technology, a high-pressure pump directs liquid ink from a reservoir through a gunbody and a microscopic nozzle, creating a continuous stream of ink droplets via the Plateau-Rayleigh instability. A piezoelectric crystal creates an acoustic wave as it vibrates within the gunbody and causes the stream of liquid to break into droplets at regular intervals – 64,000 to 165,000 droplets per second may be achieved. The ink droplets are subjected to an electrostatic field created by a charging electrode as they form; the field varies according to the degree of drop deflection desired. This results in a controlled, variable electrostatic charge on each droplet. Charged droplets are separated by one or more uncharged “guard droplets” to minimize electrostatic repulsion between neighbouring droplets.

The charged droplets pass through an electrostatic field and are directed (deflected) by electrostatic deflection plates to print on the receptor material (substrate), or allowed to continue on undeflected to a collection gutter for re-use. The more highly charged droplets are deflected to a greater degree. Only a small fraction of the droplets is used to print, the majority being recycled.

Continuous ink jet is one of the oldest ink jet technologies in use and is fairly mature. The major advantages are the very high velocity (~50 m/s) of the ink droplets, which allows for a relatively long distance between print head and substrate, and the very high drop ejection frequency, allowing for very high speed printing. Another advantage is freedom from nozzle clogging as the jet is always in use, therefore allowing volatile solvents such as ketones and alcohols to be employed, giving the ink the ability to "bite" into the substrate and dry quickly.

The ink system requires active solvent regulation to counter solvent evaporation during the time of flight (time between nozzle ejection and gutter recycling) and from the venting process whereby air that is drawn into the gutter along with the unused drops is vented from the reservoir. Viscosity is monitored and a solvent (or solvent blend) is added in order to counteract the solvent loss.

See our complete line of Continuous Ink-Jet printers.