Dubbed as the print industry's Steve Jobs, or a modern-day Gutenberg, Benny Landa certainly knows how to create a buzz. His radical new digital printing method based on tiny particles became a huge talking point at Drupa, where he took the wraps off one of the industry's best-kept secrets: a whole new kind of printing.

Anyone who visited the Landa stand in Hall 9 was able to look under the hood (at least to some extent) of the Nanography presses that were running on the booth. Astonishingly, Landa not only brought a new way of printing to Drupa, but the company also brought six brand-new presses along, too.

 The caveat is that not all of the presses on display were run live at the show, although two of them were – the B2 S7 press (up to 12,000sph, or 6,000sph perfecting) and the B1-format S10 (up to 13,000sph, 6,500sph perfecting) were seen printing five times per day after the sold-out Landa theatre presentations.

Landa: "The process is not fully optimised yet"

What is Nanography?

It all starts with Landa’s NanoInk, which is made using nano-scale pigment particles that are "just a few tens of nanometres" in size. Chairman and founder Benny Landa explains that, at this size, the pigments develop special properties, producing a very pure colour, so less pigment is needed.

This aqueous ink is shipped as a concentrate in 15kg containers, and then diluted to the correct working concentration inside the press using ordinary tap water; internal systems within the press handle any necessary water treatment. "We are not shipping water all around the globe," says Landa, emphasising the environmentally friendly approach being championed by the company.

As the ink is used up, the containers are constantly weighed, so the press operator knows how much is left of any given colour. The containers collapse down when empty and Landa says they can be disposed of along with everyday plastic beverage bottles.

All of the Landa presses print in eight colours, which could be CMYK plus four special colours, or CCMMYYKK for faster printing or higher resolution. The presses’ resolution is 600dpi or 1,200x600dpi.

Heated blanket belt

At present, Landa is using a modified version of the Kyocera piezo inkjet printheads for its ‘ink ejectors’, with the integration carried out by specialist company Graph-Tech of Switzerland. The company isn’t tied to one manufacturer or type of printhead, though.

"Billions of dollars are being invested in inkjet technology development by many companies. We simply leverage that investment – all vendors are a potential partner for us," says Landa, who was also spotted during Drupa investigating the Konica Minolta heads being shown by the manufacturer’s external sales wing Industrial Inkjet.

In the Nanography process, the ink ejectors create a complete CMYK print image by ejecting drops of NanoInk onto a heated blanket belt.

The image is dried on the belt, which is understood to be heated to around 120°C, forming an ultra-thin polymeric film. This film, which could be likened to a decal, then meets the printing substrate at an impression cylinder, and is transferred to it via pressure.

Just before the image is transferred, an infra-red booster lamp kicks in, providing the necessary temperature for the transfer to work properly. "It requires very little energy – the ink film has to be a certain temperature to transfer. We just bump it up to that before transfer," Landa explains. "This is only a fraction of the heat that is used for drying conventional print; it is not like
fusing."

The blanket belt is an operator-replaceable component that is estimated to have a life of around 500,000 impressions, although it is expected to be greater than this by the time presses actually ship.

The sheets coming off the press feel barely warm, because it’s not the substrate itself that is heated, it’s the blanket. Print output can immediately be used in finishing processes, claims Landa, due to NanoInk’s high level of scratch- and abrasion-resistance. The Landa press operators at Drupa were seen demonstrating this by rubbing a coin across freshly-printed sheets.

One major selling point of Nanography is its ability to print onto standard printing papers, whether coated or uncoated, and also onto non-absorbent synthetics such as plastic films. The NanoInk layer’s thinness means it conforms to gloss levels of the stock.

Inside the box

The sheetfed Landa presses are based on sheet transfer and gripper technology from Komori, which was also the first traditional press manufacturer to sign up as a partner to license Nanography. Manroland Sheetfed and Heidelberg have followed suit with pledges to develop presses using the technology. More partners are expected to be announced in various segments and markets.

The imaging heads and blanket belt are positioned above the cylinder assembly.

The web press models differ in that they use high-speed web handling mechanisms developed in-house by Landa. The web presses – the single-sided W5 and W10 for flexible packaging, and duplex W50 for commercial printing – have some special features, because of the way Nanography makes use of the intermediate heated blanket belt.

The blanket belt has a seam that needs to be avoided when laying down the image. Dancer rollers are used on the web transport to compensate for this, and a section of the paper web is reversed in order to marry up the substrate with the next image position on the blanket. It’s similar to the way some label converting lines operate, albeit on the Landa devices this is happening at extremely high speed because the web presses run at 200m/min.

Landa describes it as "very good engineering" that uses servo devices to register the end of the previous image to the beginning of the next one.

Another aspect of the W50 also demonstrates Landa’s outside-the-box thinking compared with conventional press structures. The W50 uses the same one-metre-wide printing module as the B1 sheetfed press, but in this case half is used to print side one of the web, which is then turned and the other half of the print module is used to print the second side, hence its ability to print 200m/min duplex.