How you can benefit from designer inks
24 May 2018 08:19

“Never change a running system.” – this piece of wisdom is commonly known through all industries, including digital printing. Why switch your performing print system to another ink? Why take the risk to sacrifice current runability? Why take a downtime into consideration? All these questions are justified and prove a good entrepreneurial spirit. No matter if you are running a small-, medium- or large-sized printing house, you are running a serious business with a reasonable intention. This is exactly where your motivation to critically consider you current ink should come from: you are running a serious business with the intention to achieve the most turnover you can. This will only work out if you offer a bundle of service and product which at least satisfies your customers or even exceeds their expectations.

Your current ink setting may satisfy your customers. It may also satisfy you because it works “okay” or even “good” with your printing workflow. However, what if you could exceed your current level of performance? Imagine you could not only meet your customers’ expectations but even exceed them? What if a new ink would perform even better than your current ink?

Of course, operating a printing house does not allow to test-and-try and try-and-test as you wish.
Downtimes cost money, that is as proven as you should never change a running system. So how to minimize the risk of disappointing ink trials? Imagine there would be an ink with a better performance, tailored exactly towards your printing machinery without runability issues, painfully long downtime for changeover and warranty loss of the printer – wouldn’t that be worth a try?

This is exactly what designer inks are about: the team of the ARMOR Industrial Inks Lab is specialised in designing ink creations which are perfectly fitting your printing hardware and your quality requirements. In their lab in Dortmund/Germany, the team is equipped with all necessary high-tech and prepared to contribute all their expertise to designing individual ink creations according to your individual requirements. Before any ink creation is presented to their clients, the lab team forwards their current design version to the application managers. Together with the product manager, the ink creation is carefully and extensively tested and benchmarked against the client’s requirements. While the lab team looks far beyond the printhead and the substrate to create the perfectly matching ink, the technical team focusses on simulating the environmental conditions of the customer’s printing environment. This is one of the key factors in the approval process as the environmental conditions within the printing room have a strong impact on the print performance. In order to be able to simulate industrial print runs and industrial printing speeds under a broad variety of environmental conditions, the ARMOR Industrial Inks Lab has recently launched the building of a unique printing hall including a single pass test printing machine. This project has a 5-digit budget and will be ready for service by end of 2018.

Undertaking all these efforts ensures your ink creation corresponds exactly to the needs you have specified to ARMOR Industrial Ink Labs-team before. Only if all application tests were accomplished successfully, the team presents the ink creation to you for testing and approval. Afterwards, your ink creation is forwarded to the Polish ink production site in Prudnik for upscale and production of the volumes you need. Since both sites, the lab in Dortmund and the production plant in Prudnik, are certified according to the industrial quality standards ISO 9001 and 14001, you can be sure your designer ink corresponds exactly to the ink creation you approved. Beyond ISO 9001 and 14001, certifications according to further standards of the industrial target markets of the Inks Lab team are in preparation.

All these efforts, precise analytics and dedicated design work not only ensure you will receive an ink creation which meets your printing quality requirements – it also minimizes all the strenuous and disappointing downtimes, trial runs and runability issues currently keeping you from switching to an ink setting which lifts your current quality level by the decisive bit.

Prepared on the basis of  ARMOR Industrial Inks