Dirk Brouns, Vice President Large Format Graphics at Canon Production Printing and Rob Puts, Vice President Manufacturing and Logistics at Canon Production Printing
Canon has opened a new central ink production facility for UVgel ink on its innovation and development campus in Venlo, The Netherlands
Production volumes of UVgel ink for its roll-to-roll Colorado printer family have doubled in the last year. In 2019, Canon completed more than 1,200 global customer installations of its UVgel Colorado roll-to-roll large format printer series. To support this increasing customer base and their ever-growing roll-to-roll print volumes, Canon has ramped up its UVgel ink production capacity.
Dirk Brouns, Vice President Large Format Graphics at Canon Production Printing, explained: “Our customers are printing more and more with their Colorado devices, with average volumes worldwide already exceeding 15,000m2 per year. And we expect to see these volumes continue to grow. Some of our top-performing customers are even surpassing annual production volumes of 100,000m2. 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.”
Fully operational since 1 December 2019, the new ink production centre features a highly 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, ensuring speedy delivery, the company explained.
“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. 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,” said Rob Puts, Vice President Manufacturing and Logistics at Canon Production Printing.
With the new UVgel ink production facility, Canon said it further underlines its continued commitment and growth ambitions in the large format graphics roll-to-roll market.
