Electronics For Imaging, Inc. has enhanced the world’s fastest digital textile printer, the EFI Reggiani BOLT.
The upgrade is a combination of hardware and software enhancements that will minimise artefacts, compensating for missing nozzles that may occur over time and enhancing uniformity to deliver smoother solid colours. The upgrade also delivers improved quality and smoother gradients, plus it enables faster printhead replacement and drastically increases file processing speed by up to 200% for large, complex files.
Dedicated colour profile creation on the newest-version EFI Fiery BT-1000 digital front end driving the printer delivers better, more-intense tones and improves capabilities for matching existing colour profiles commonly used in digital textile printing.
The enhancements are an important step in further enhancing digital printing’s presence in the industry, bringing greener, more-sustainable inkjet technologies to the fore as a replacement for analogue dyeing procedures that make textile manufacturing the world’s second-largest polluting industry.
“With the industry’s top speed and now the delivery of even higher print quality, the EFI Reggiani BOLT can help spur a revolution in textile printing, migrating more production to digital technology, ensuring the fastest return on investment on high-volume work thanks to superior throughput and unmatched reliability and uptime,” said EFI Reggiani Senior Vice President and General Manager Adele Genoni. “With the BOLT’s new enhancements – and its ability to print extremely high quality on a variety of designs and fabric types at record-breaking speeds up to 90 metres per minute – the economic cross-over point between analogue and digital printing of fabrics is lower than ever before. The time for single-pass technology is now with this best-in-class, sustainable, high-quality and high-throughput digital textile print solution.”
This 1.8-metre-wide single-pass printer – the first digital textile printer to receive the Printing United Alliance InterTech Award for advanced print technology innovations – is well-positioned to have a major transformational impact on the industry. With its current installed base, the EFI Reggiani BOLT is already responsible for printing more than 50 million linear metres of fabric worldwide.
Faster processing and higher-quality print
Now available globally, the EFI Reggiani BOLT upgrade features hardware and software enhancements for improved overall performance, printing quality, uniformity, and increased user friendliness including:
- Nozzle out and uniformity compensation features that improve solid colour appearance and enhance overall printing quality
- Increased performance and improved processing speed for large, complex files
- Integration of a new digital camera that both provides for precise and consistent print results and shortens the time for print head replacement and alignment
- An enhanced user interface – based on EFI Fiery Command WorkStation 6.0 – that is easier to use
- Fiery Smart Ink Estimator, a key tool to help determine job profitability based on accurate calculation of ink costs prior to printing
