Canon officially opened a new production facility for UVgel ink at its innovation and development campus in Venlo, The Netherlands, to keep up with growing demand from users of its Colorado roll-to-roll large format printers. Global production volumes of UVgel ink for Colorado printers doubled in the last year.
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| Dirk Brouns, vice president large format graphics at Canon Production Printing and Rob Puts, vice president manufacturing and logistics at Canon Production Printing. |
In 2019, Canon completed more than 1,200 global customer installations of its UVgel Colorado roll-to-roll large format printer series, the company says. To support this increasing customer base and its ever-growing roll-to-roll print volumes, Canon has ramped up its UVgel ink production capacity.
“Our customers are printing more and more with their Colorado devices, with average volumes worldwide already exceeding 15,000 m2 per year,” says Dirk Brouns, vice president large format graphics at Canon Production Printing. “And we expect to see these volumes continue to grow. Some of our top-performing customers are even surpassing annual production volumes of 100,000 m2.
"With our new ink factory, we can continue to supply our customers and partners with high-quality UVgel inks and support growing print volumes in the field, both today and in the future.”
Operational since December 1st, 2019, the new ink production centre features an innovative workflow to process the raw ingredients in multiple steps and in barrels of 200 litres for each colour.
At the end of the automated production line, the ink is transferred into Canon UVgel ink bottles, ready for immediate shipment to the customer.
“We’ve been able to double our ink production in less than a year and our operations team is eager to continue to help our customers confidently print growing volumes of large format roll-to-roll graphics,” says Rob Puts, vice president manufacturing and logistics at Canon Production Printing.
“At the same time, our new facility has been designed to be as environmentally friendly as possible. With a focus on operational efficiencies, the facility is delivering increased energy savings by reusing cooling capacity from other production plants on our campus and using a heat exchange unit to warm the cool air coming into the building with the heat of the air leaving the production hall.”
With the new UVgel ink production facility, Canon further underlines its continued commitment and growth ambitions in the large format graphics roll-to-roll market, the company says.
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| Canon Production Printing in Venlo, The Netherlands |
