PrintEngine™ Colour
- PrintEngine™ Colour
- ixPressia offers a complete solution for colour and monochrome printing for drop on demand inkjet systems.
Developing a colour printer is easy with ixPressia PrintEngine™ technology.
It can interface with all the major drop-on-demand head types and supports all the key stage layouts and configurations.
The user interface is fully customisable to support your print application, with pages as simple or as complex as your users need.
All the features needed for use in a production environment are included, such as user levels, error reporting and production logging.
All common image types can be printed, including tiff, pdf and postscript for a fully professional product. There is a built-in RIP to allow one-stop printing.
Colour management is available using ICC colour profile files created by the printer users with industry standard tools. Four colour and six colour processes are supported.
Printers of any complexity
The PrintEngine™ supports all configurations of printheads, from very simple single head printers to sophisticated multiple colour systems. Print head layouts are specified by configuration files, making it easy to develop new printer configurations. The PrintEngine™ supports the head manufacturer's datapath electronics and can drive multiple electronics for larger printers.
Speed
The ixPressia PrintEngine™ has been developed to take advantage of the new generation of multicore processors and is fully pipelined. This means that it runs very fast. There is also no waiting when the user hits the print button – the image is processed immediately section by section and printing starts instantly.
Advanced Heads and print modes
The ixPressia PrintEngine™ and dithering algorithims fully support the new generation of greyscale heads allowing the highest quality imaging to be obtained. Greyscale head technology gives higher spatial resolution and better image quality.
The PrintEngine™ can also control the stage, so advanced printing modes are available such as bi-directional or interleaved to give your product a competitive advantage.
Stage layouts supported
All key stage layouts are supported including: no stage, one axis web and full XY. The PrintEngine™ supports communication to stage PLC controllers through modbus. Other peripherals can also be controlled (ink systems, UV lamps) through customisation of the PrintEngine™.
Your printer the way you want it
The ixPressia PrintEngine™ can run with its own user interface or it can be controlled remotely from another computer (which can set the print parameters). This allows it to be easily integrated with existing print management software or other system control software.
Features
| Print Heads | |
|---|---|
| Xaar | Xaar 318 (Leopard), Xaar 500, Xaar 760, Xaar 1001 |
| Dimatix | S-Class |
| Konica Minolta | KM512 |
| PrintOS | H8, T8 and P16 |
| Head Layout | Configurable at design time from single head to multiple heads per colour. |
| Electronics | |
|---|---|
| Supported Printhead electronics | Xaar XUSB TTP Meteor Konica Minolta EB100 Additional electronics can be supported please contact us to discuss |
| Supported ink electronics | Xaar Ink supply system |
| Supported stage electronics | Written to customer requirements, please contact us to discuss |
| Image Pipeline | |
|---|---|
| Input images (bitmaps) | JPEG, TIFF (RGB & CMYK), PNG, BMP Either as a single bitmap or 1 image per colour plane. |
| Input images (vector) | PostScript (PS, EPS, PDF), DXF (optional), Gerber (Optional) |
| Colourspace | Monochrome, RGB, CMYK, CMYKcm, CMYKcmyk |
| Colour-conversion | ICC Colour profile (customer supplied when 6 colours or more) |
| Supported bit formats | 1 to 255 shades of grey 1 to 8 bits per pixel MSB or LSB first Raw bitmap for sending directly to printhead |
| Dithering (halftoning) | Error diffusion |
| Image pre-processing | Rotation (90, 180 or 270 degrees) Scaling (nearest neighbour or cubic spline) Image step & repeat in Grid, Brick or Wallpaper patterns |
| Max swathe size | In an XY system there is 1 swathe per pass. Max swathe size 250Mb. |
| Max image size | No limit (see comments on Max swathe size) |
| Printing | |
|---|---|
| Printing schemes | Single-pass (web) Monodirectional scanning Bi-directional scanning Double pass interlacing to increase resolution in X Double pass Interlacing to increase resolution in Y Quad pass interlacing to increase resolution in X & Y Dual heads to increase print speed Dual heads to increase resolution |
| Remote control | Integrated HTTP server to work with a standard web-browser or to communicate with another program. Alternatively, integrate directly with an existing system using a simple TCP/IP protocol. |
| System Requirements | OS Windows XP or Windows Vista |
| CPU 2GHz Pentium 4 or better. | If multi-core processors are available they are fully utilised to increase performance. |
| Memory | 256Mb recommend, see comments on Max Swathe size |
| Throughput | Overlaps image processing, download of image in to the print heads and stage movements to give optimal performance and throughput. |
| User interface | |
|---|---|
| Configurable | Specify at design time what appears on which screens |
| Language support | The user interface can be translated via a string table into different languages |
- Applications
- Colour graphics printing
- Monochrome materials printing with DXF option
- New printer applications
- Key Features Full list
- All major heads supported
- ICC colour profile support
- User interface customizable for your application
- All key stage types supported
- Fast start printing
- Advanced print modes: interleaved, bi-directional, high res
- All major image formats supported including .pdf and post-script