On September 12thand 13th, I attended Label Expo Americas 2012 (http://www.labelexpo-americas.com/). During this event, I had the opportunity to see on-demand color label printers from a few other companies: Primera, KG Digital, Colordyne and Ownx. I like to share with you my thoughts on what I learned and saw at this event.
But before I give my specific views, I like to make one observation for all these companies. All of these companies showed examples of printing “Prime” labels. If you don’t know, a prime label acts as the main identification of a product. This label is designed to attract attention; and contains information to appeal to a buyer. Most prime labels are produced by printers or in print shops. The labels shown by these companies were 100% covered with ink, commonly referred to as “flood coated”.
In the Primera booth, I discussed the LX900 with the sales representative: http://www.primeralabel.com/lx900_features.html.
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| Primera LX900 with labels |
In the booth, Primera was using the LX900 to print this prime label covered with 100% ink.
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| Primera Produced Prime Label |
With 4,800 dpi and 4 colors, this $2,995 list price printer produces prime labels for products such as wine or olive oil very well. However, this printer runs very slow at higher resolution, comes only with a USB interface and uses die-based inks that may run or smear when wet.
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| SwiftColor 8" printer |
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| SwiftColor 4" printer |
According to the person I met in the booth, the $10,000+, 4”, 4-color printer uses die-based inks to print up to speeds of 8” per second.
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| SwiftColor 8" Prime Label |
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| SwiftColor 4" Prime Label |
They could not tell me when the 8” version would be available.
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| Colordyne printer |
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| Colordyne printer |
The 1600 S is similar to the 1600 C, but prints only sheet-fed stock.
According to the people I spoke with in the booth, these printers cost between $10,000 and $15,000. Here is example of the prime labels they were printing in their booth:
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| Colordyne Prime Label |
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| Speedstar |
With a built-in computer and software, this 12” per second, 4-color, $23,500+ prime label printer produced very good labels that were shown going through a cutter after printing.
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| Speedstar Label (black smudges are from my scanner) |
Although fast and high resolution, Memjet may have trouble printing in the real world: http://www.large-format-printers.org/mems-printheads-memjet-printers-reality-check.php
Some of you may be wondering, why am I making you aware of these companies? From my perspective, the more companies promote on-demand color labels, the more the entire market for this technology will grow. I see this growth increasing the global automated data capture/barcode printer business significant; and a real opportunity for value added resellers in this market. So the more companies, the merrier for you!
Guy Mikel
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