SPGPrints, one of the leading Dutch manufacturers of textile printers, has set to introduce a new single-pass digital textile printer – Pike. The printer will be premiered at ITMA 2015 in Milan in November. Pike is based on a full-width array of Fujifilm Samba print heads, specially modified in a joint project for optimum performance in textile printing. The heads are incorporated in a highly accurate but user-friendly print-bar technology, called ‘Archer’.
One essential advantage of the technology is that the Archer Technology can jet accurately across a distance much greater than can other heads widely used in current digital-textile applications. The head plates in the Archer array will typically be 4mm away from the surface of the substrate, compared with the typical 1.5mm of other print heads – so greatly reducing the risk of ‘head strike’, which can damage these expensive components. The first Pike printer is a 6-colour machine in which each colour is represented by an Archer print bar containing 43 printheads, giving a printing width of 1850mm.
