The Printing United Alliance Pinnacle Awards are the industry’s largest, most respected awards competition for print-related technology and products. The Awards recognise product excellence, technology and quality. Previously known as the InterTech Awards, the competition looks at the development of technologies predicted to have a major impact on commercial printing, digital textile, packaging, screen printing, wide format or related industries.
Open to all Printing United Alliance supplier members, the Pinnacle Product Award competition evaluates products that are commercially available in 2023. This year, 160 entries across 58 categories, covering analogue, digital, output and non-output technologies, were judged by a panel of experts from the printing industry.
The Pinnacle Technology Award was conferred on Canon’s UVgel white ink option, an integral part of the Colorado M-series, a modular roll-to-roll printer with two-speed configurations.
Customers can also benefit from the unique performance advantages of UVgel and print a wider spectrum of applications with the introduction of white UVgel ink. UVgel’s unique formulation produces dense, opaque white images in fewer printing passes and with fewer production issues and nozzle-cleaning and maintenance requirements often associated with white ink. This all results in smooth, error-free prints with minimal waste and optimal productivity.
The key to Canon UVgel technology is the fact that the ink is essentially a gel, developed according to UV curing principles. The simplified stages of the Canon UVgel printing process are as follows:
- Inside the printheads, Canon UVgel ink is heated and turns from gel into liquid.
- The temperate controlled platen maintains the substrate at a constant 28℃ temperature regardless of environmental factors.
- On contact with the media, the liquefied ink drops return immediately to their gel state.
- In their gel state, the ink droplets are ‘pinned’ instantly to the media, assisted by a partial LED ‘precure’ process.
- Full LED curing takes place at a later stage, after the image swathe is completely formed and gelled on the media.
The solidified state of the pinned gel dot prevents coalescence (merging) between individual ink drops, delivering optimal control over the dot to prevent spread (dot gain). Because LED curing is performed later than with existing technologies, images have a more uniform, smoother surface. Prints dry instantly, requiring no evaporative drying process.
Caption:
Canon UVgel ensures smooth, error-free prints with minimal waste and optimal productivity
