Kyocera today announced that it will start mass production in April 2012 of two new inkjet printhead products — the KJ4B-Y for water-based ink and the KJ4A-B for UV-curable ink — both offering the world’s fastest print speeds. KJ4B-Y (for water-based ink) provides high-resolution printing combined with a print speed that is approximately 1.3 times faster than Kyocera’s conventional products, by ejecting ink up to 40,000 times per second (at 40kHz drive frequency) from each ink nozzle, resulting in approximately 100 million drops per second from a printhead with 2,656 nozzles.
KJ4A-B (for UV-curable ink) provides high-resolution printing combined with a print speed that is approximately 1.5 times faster than Kyocera’s conventional products, by ejecting ink up to 30,000 times per second (at 30kHz drive frequency) from each ink nozzle, resulting in approximately 80 million drops per second from a printhead with 2,656 nozzles. This allows high-speed and high-resolution printing for an increasing number of commercial products, such as label printing for plastic and glass bottles and containers using UV-curable ink that enables printing on non-absorbent materials including films and plastics. Kyocera will initially produce 1,000 units per month (total for both types combined) and will gradually increase production volume.
