Printing in White?

[Digital Dave]

If you want a machine that is at least 48″ wide, your best bet is a U.V curable machine such as the new Zund, or the Durst Rho160W.

They don’t come cheap though!

[Michael Calcott]

Is white ink readily available for these machines. When I have outsourced printing in the past I have been told that printing in white is very rare.

We will be printing white onto clear for diffused dots/ thin band effects for on glass partitions in offices where the pattern may be too intense for cut vinyl.

I will search for these machines on the internet, but if you have links it will be appreciated.

Micky

[Digital Dave]

Here are the links you will need.

http://www.durstuk.co.uk/

http://www.bplightbrigade.com/html/nur_tempo.html

I know the last one looks like it takes you to a Nur Tempo, but it does actually take you to the Zund 250C.

I hope they are useful to you.

[Rodney Gold]

You can use a small machine like the versacam to do this.
You print reverse on clear , you overlaminate with white vinyl and then you cut away the vinyl where the printed crop marks are , you load the material into the machine , read the crop marks and cut thru the white and the clear.
You can then apply to a window from behind and have a white backing. We do a ton of this.

[Rodney Gold]

Erm , we use our soljet for this , its 54″ wide , the versacam is too small , it only prints 30″ (just saw you need 48″) There is a new Versacam , a 54″ coming out soon that would do perfectly for you in this regard , its about $20k vs the Soljet at $30k
UV printers are not the way to go right now , they are not fully developed and their prices are horrendous. UV inks are not the magic bullet- they are VERY expensive and do not perform well on anything flexible. Perhaps in a a few years they will have developed better UV inks , but now UV printers are very much bleeding edge with pricing that basically makes you haemmorage 🙂

[Michael Calcott]

Thanks for the links. I have made contact with them.

The glass partitions that we will apply the material to are usually 1m – 1.2m wide and I don’t want to get into joins etc.

Also for this type of work, I want to get away from cutting vinyl.

For example we have a customer who wants 4mm white dots with 2mm spaces on 20 sheets of glass measuring 1.0m x 2.2m. That’s a lot of dots per panel to cut.

Thanks

Micky

[Michael Calcott]

Thanks Rodney. I will look into the versacamm 54″