Needham Coding unveils own brand CIJ printers
Coding and marking equipment company Needham Coding UK has launched its own brand range of high performance continuous ink jet (CIJ) printers.
The compact ‘N’ series is said to offer cost, performance and environmental benefits, boasting a Mean Time Before Failure (MTBF) of 40,000 operating hours and is designed for harsh wet and dry applications across a range of industries, including food and beverage.
Offering small and large character printing from 0.6mm up to 19mm, it uses multi-national character sets, featuring multiple languages and Unicode character printing. The printers reproduce a range of fonts such as bar codes, batch numbers and best before, sell-by and expiration dates, as well as other logos and graphics, directly onto uneven or flexible substrates like glass, plastics, paper, metal and rubber.
Features include Trupoint, which is said to provide superior CIJ print quality. Through high speed processing and CIJ specific electronic hardware, millions of drop patterns are dynamically adjusted on the fly to achieve high print quality. The printers also incorporate Needham Coding’s CleanStart technology which automatically cleans the system – eliminating the need for daily and weekly manual cleaning.
Models in the ‘N’ series provide a non-contact print operation with the ink thrown from the printhead a minimum ink throw distance of 12mm and up to a maximum distance of 50mm. Depending on the model, the ‘N’ series can print a single line of text at speeds exceeding 600m/minute, two lines over 200m/minute and three or four lines of print at 100m/minute.
“The ‘N’ series is set to be a real game-changer both for existing customers and previously untapped business,” says Aled Ellis, managing director at The Needham Group. “We are confident the printers will meet the efficiency requirements of virtually any production environment with the capability to print anything and marking and coding everything.”
The four models include N16, N16 Plus, N25 and N32. The N16 ink jet printer is designed for basic, entry level applications printing one or two lines of text, barcodes and graphics, while the advanced N32 is aimed at high speed applications printing up to five lines of text, barcode and graphics and offering 10,000 hour operation between service intervals.
