Ricoh Europe has agreed to a landmark €50 million printhead technology deal to extend its collaboration with Durst Group. Under the agreement, Ricoh printheads will be developed for upcoming Durst printing systems.
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| Durst headquarters in Brixen, Italy |
A leading manufacturer of advanced digital printing and production technologies, Durst Group already uses Ricoh Gen 5 inkjet printheads in its Alpha textile printing systems and the Durst P5 series for large format printing.
As part of this new deal, Ricoh printheads will also be further developed for upcoming Durst printing systems for various fields of application.
"The partnership will allow us to develop our printheads in a more focused way with real-world requirements,” said Dr. Christian Compera, global GM of Ricoh’s Industrial Print business. “Often there can be a high level of protectiveness surrounding printhead intellectual property, materials and printhead production technologies as well as ink formulations. By bringing together the Ricoh and Durst development teams, we share the goal of continuously improving the entire printing system, which ultimately benefits customers.”
Christoph Gamper, CEO and co-owner of Durst Group: “This deal reaffirms and continues a collaborative approach with Ricoh. Extending our partnership with Ricoh enables us to achieve a faster time-to-market for new printing systems, as we work together on the perfect interaction of printheads inks and substrates. Not only does this allow us to achieve maximum print quality and performance but also to guarantee reliability for extended printer life. It gives our customers a clear basis for their investment decisions, without the risk factor of the printhead."
The technical expertise and teams of both Ricoh and Durst will collaborate on new solutions, developing printheads as well as printers, to open up potential for inkjet technology to address the needs of emerging applications, according to a Ricoh press release. “New ways to use inkjet technologies and materials for enhanced sustainability – for example lower drying energy consumption – are already being explored. Further collaborative initiatives will be revealed in the coming months.
“In recent years, the two companies have intensified their partnership and created the most stable and flexible printing system, especially in digital textile printing with the Durst Alpha series. Though the end result might seem simple, to achieve maximum print quality and productivity and such reliable, risk-free solutions has involved intensive development and ink formulation work, plus rigorous testing of thousands of printheads and tonnes of ink. This experience was then applied to Large Format Printing.”
Headquartered in Tokyo, Ricoh Group has operations throughout the world and customers in approximately 200 countries and regions. In the financial year ended March 2021, Ricoh had worldwide sales of 1,682 billion yen (approx. 15.1 billion USD).
For further information, please visit www.ricoh-europe.com
