Flexing Inkjet Power with Stream
Kodak's history in paper, color and inkjet give it advantages in this arena.
By Henry Freedman -- Graphic Arts Online, 5/1/2008
What makes Kodak Stream technology so special when everywhere you turn you hear those words inkjet production press? Kodak has spent more than 40 years in the evolution of production volume inkjet printing technology. Second, Kodak made large volumes of its own paper for photographic prints and proofs, so they know paper. Third, ink is made up of chemicals, an area where Kodak has a very strong base. Fourth, emerging technology transfers have lead to micro-manufacturing of tiny-orifice inkjet print head components, using silicon fabrication, a new tool for Kodak to make new inkjet heads. Kodak for decades has made resists for microelectronics, so they know this art as well. Finally, throw in the emergence of nano-particle ink pigments made with rounder edges, plus Kodak's newer environmentally safe ink technologies and you have the basic ingredients of Stream.
Oh, and let's not forget those thousands of patents Kodak has in the inkjet arena. Put this all together and we get over 2,000 pleasing color 8.5×11´´ pages per minute running today.
Stream works because it is an entire system optimization of the droplet, chemistry and paper. Kodak has pioneered delivering this with a continuous stream of ink that deflects the desired droplets that print to paper at an exceptional rate of speed. Other manufacturers use deliver drops on demand that are shot individually when needed. Kodak's continuous Stream technology appears to be the Uzzi gun for speed of fire. Where drop-on-demand technology requires many more rows of tiny orificed jets, Kodak gets by with fewer and delivers a degree of speed and reliability unmatched by others.
One drop-on-on demand system we recently reviewed generates 60,000 lines per second at 30 KHz. The Kodak Stream technology generates over 100,000 lines a second and can go upwards of 800 KHz for its droplet rate. This has many advantages when it comes to the variety of papers and the fidelity of color. Kodak is reliably printing billions of pages with inkjet daily in demanding production environments. In fact Kodak has stated publicly that close to 5% of today's business mail in the postal system is printed by its systems.
As paper moves faster and faster under the inkjet heads the velocity and pressure to shoot the droplets to paper must go up. Kodak leads in another area with the highest droplet pressure-to-substrate and also can run significantly faster than the 1,000 pages per minute of their concept press. Kodak's Stream heads are placed further away from the paper due to their continuous jet design and this also has advantages when web splices move through the live running press or web breaks occur. This results in less chance of head damage, which would be a catastrophic loss to a production inkjet press. Overall it appears that Kodak Stream offers a higher probability of reliability than other present day designs.
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| Author Information |
| Freedman, print scientist and inventor, studied printing and photo science at RIT and holds an MBA from George Washington University. |
