The last three months of 2011 proved to be a busy time for Screen Europe and marked its most successful period for sales of the high-volume, web-fed Truepress Jet520 inkjet press. Orders from four companies in Russia, Slovenia, Turkey and the UK for direct mail, book, transactional and ticket printing illustrate the diversity of applications for Screen’s modular high-speed inkjet system.
Kees Mulder, President of Screen Europe, puts the success down to the flexibility of the Truepress Jet520. “What was particularly satisfying was that each installation has been for a completely different application and this really shows that the Truepress Jet520 has the quality and flexibility to enable a wide variety of print applications to move to digital. Not only is each installation in a different country and for a different application, but they covered our complete product range from a monochrome device going for book printing to a 220m colour machine for direct mail.”
One of the characteristics of the Screen Truepress Jet520 that makes it particularly flexible for different applications is its ability to produce high quality results on a wide variety of papers. Tim Taylor, Vice President of Solutions & Technology, is particularly happy with the results they are achieving on regular book wove as well as very thin material: “We have worked very hard to optimize the print quality over the last four years and the results we are achieving today are outstanding. Recent tests on standard offset book woves have shown that our unique greyscale heads and very small droplet sizes are ideally suited to these types of material.”
Over the last four years, the Screen Truepress Jet520 has grown into an extensive family of products that range from entry-level monochrome machines that are a cost effective replacement for toner devices, right through to its flagship machine, the four-colour Truepress Jet520ZZ that is capable of printing at almost 3,000 A4 pages per minute (220m/min).
Screen remains the market leader in the manufacturing of high-speed inkjet machines with approximately 50% of worldwide installations of all web-fed inkjet presses leaving its Kyoto factory. Kees Mulder confirmed: “We have built more than 380 machines since it was launched at IPEX in 2006 and the overall reliability and consistency is the undisputed benchmark in the industry.”
Looking towards Drupa, Screen anticipates further improvements in print quality allied to significant developments from the paper industry that will take inkjet into even more markets. Kees Mulder concluded: “Despite the challenging economic times, we have never been engaged in more sales cycles for high-speed inkjet than we are today. As our print quality improves and the range of substrates increases, new opportunities arise every month. This, combined with excellent cost of ownership proposition, leads us to expect further significant growth in Screen’s market share in 2012.”