Challenges to come

While Landa clearly wowed audiences and convinced many with the promise of Nanography, products are not set to be commercially available until the end of next year, and there are still plenty of hurdles to overcome before anyone has a saleable Nanographic product. 

With so much focus on Nanography’s eco-credentials, what about the recyclability of printed materials produced using the process, especially with concern in the paper recycling industry over the deinkability of inkjet and HP Indigo print?

We know that Nanography output cannot be deinked using the same flotation processes used for offset printed papers. Landa is currently working with a number of deinking consortia including the Digital Printing Deinking Alliance (DPDA) to evaluate the different deinking solutions available. “Unlike inkjet, our ink sits on the surface of the paper, which makes it a lot easier,” he explains. “I certainly expect our output to be deinkable – it’s just that the parameters are not exact yet.” 

Obvious flaws

At Drupa, Landa and his team were upfront about the fact that Nanographic prints currently show very obvious flaws. The samples shown were all striking and colourful full-page images of animals, such as tigers and peacocks. The image subject matter was quite ‘noisy’ in itself and there were no print samples showing flat tints or text.

The print samples featured very obvious banding lines and white spots in the image area where ink was entirely missing (see the images to the above left, which show close-up detail of the samples). Some visitors expressed surprise at just how poor the print quality was – despite the attempts to manage expectations, although others praised the image intensity and brightness of the colours despite the flaws. 

Landa says the current faults are to do with the ejecting process, and are not fundamental issues involving the transfer of the print image from the blanket. “The process is not fully optimised yet. We have flaws and we are very open about it. This all takes testing and it’s not perfect yet.”

Solving these quality issues, and ensuring the machinery itself will be suitably robust in operation, will be occupying the Landa team over the coming months. But they are confident that they will achieve commercialisation in the timescale envisaged, and that the so-called ‘second digital revolution’ will begin in earnest next year.