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Tech Focus: Landa

Nanography
19 Jul 2012
Topics: digital press (/digital-printer/search-results.aspx?
keyword=digital press)

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If you count prole alone, Landa was 18 Dec 2012
the star of drupa. Surely never before Sheetfed digital
has a brand new, unproven printing presses update
(/digital-
process attracted so much attention.
printer/features/dp-
There were posters all around the 2012/december-
massive Messe fairground, constant 2012/121210sheetfed-

crowds on the stand looking at the

prototype presses, and the ve-daily continues-
development.aspx)
presentations in the 380 seat theatre
13 Dec 2012
were booked up three days in advance.
Take the wrap
(/digital-
Not bad for something you won't be printer/features/dp-
able to buy for a couple of years and 2012/december-
which even its founder Benny Landa 2012/121213take-
the-wrap.aspx)
admits needs a lot of improvement 13 Dec 2012
before it's ready for the market. Finishing Line:
Vivid Matrix MF-
Mr Landa's claim is that the 530 Auto Feeder
Nanographic process that underpins the (/digital-
Tweets by @digitalprintmag

printer/features/dp-
presses will revolutionise print. He says
2012/december- Digital Printer
it will achieve the lowest cost per copy of 2012/dp12132012_vivid_autofeed.aspx)
@digitalprintmag
any digital process, competing with litho 13 Dec 2012
NEWS: Next generation DigiFold
costs for medium runs of 5000 to 10,000 and AutoCreaser to be launched
copies, with the ability to print on standard oset papers as bit.ly/1XcoxjG @MorganaSystems
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well as plastics, at high speeds. Quality claims are high too:
super-sharp image dots; a wider gamut than CMYK oset;
and an ultra-thin ink lm that matches the underlying
substrate gloss.

If Landa can deliver all that, printers will be falling over

Embed View on Twitter
themselves to buy it. Indeed, the company was taking 10,000
Euro deposits for 'Letters of Intent' at the show, that gave
them a preliminary specication and cost per copy, plus a
priority place on the waiting list. It took twice as many as it
expected, one of which was from 1st Byte in London (see the
separate story).

'Digital is today responsible for only 2% of all the pages

printed worldwide' Mr Landa claims. 'We've only nibbled
around the edges. To break through into the wider industry
we've got to be able to match the quality, speed and costs of
conventional oset, on all paper stocks. Ten years after
founding Landa, we've set up new processes to go after the
other 98%.'

On show were prototype web and sheet fed Landa presses in

a range of sizes. All were unique in appearance, largely due to
the huge black touch screen control panels that covered the
whole of the operator sides. That they looked like giant iPads
was entirely intentional. That part however, was just the icing
on the cake.
The sheet fed models are the B3 format S5 (for 11,000 sheets
per hour simplex, 5500 duplex), B2 (8800 to 12,000 sph
simplex, 4400 to 6000 duplex S7 and B1 S7 (6500 to 13,000
simplex, 3,250 to 6500 duplex), taking paper from 60 to 350
g/m2. The S7 will be oered in congurations for either
commercial print or folding packaging.

Landa S5

Landa S7 cutaway

The web presses are the 560 mm web width W5, for 100 to
200 metres per minute simplex; the 1020 mm web W10
running at the same speed; and the 560 mm W50 for up to
200 metres per minute duplex.
Landa W5

Landa W50 cutaway

Prices are loosely predicted to range from $1 to $3 million,

call it 650,000 to 2 million. If this comes to pass, those
prices will be at the low end of the scale compared to
equivalent inkjets, but the Landa presses will be faster and
cheaper to run.

The industry interest is hardly surprising. Mr Landa has

revolutionised print once before. He originally founded the
pioneering digital printing systems maker Indigo and
launched it to a surprised world at Ipex 1993.
Eight years later he sold Indigo to HP for a reported $800
million, since when he's been ploughing a fair bit back in his
home country of Israel, backing startup companies,
charitable endeavours and his own Landa Labs research and
development operation.
The labs have been developing 'alternative energy
technology,' as well as 'nano-materials' for drug delivery,
personal care products, composite materials and the
pigments that go into the Nanographic process.

Mr Landa was famous for his drupa and Ipex presentations at

Indigo. For his new company he managed to go even further
over the top, with a 40 minute show including modern
dancers, pounding music and Mr Landa appearing
miraculously in a spotlight to treat the audience to his vision
of the future.

However, there was substance backing the showmanship. In

the weeks running up to the drupa Landa announced that it
had licensed its technology to two of the world's biggest
oset press makers, Komori (which supplied the running gear
for the Landa presses at drupa) and Heidelberg. As the show
opened manroland sheetfed also signed up.
So, looking past the dry ice and the dancers, how does
Nanography work? In a nutshell, it's an oset inkjet , though
the company doesn't put it that way. It's based around a new
NanoInk that uses minute particles described as 'a few tens
of nanometres across.' A nanometre is a billionth of a metre.

These particles comprise pigments coated with a polymer

resin that Mr Landa describes as 'a hot melt adhesive.' They
are suspended in water which acts a vehicle to deliver them
to the print heads. Although Landa insists on calling its heads
'ejectors,' it also says they are based on standard Kyocera KJ4
piezo inkjets. The dierence hasn't been explained. Mr Landa
says that other heads can be adapted as faster models are
developed.

What also makes Nanography unique is the way it works

inside the press. Instead of jetting the NanoInk pigment
particles and water straight onto the substrate like normal
inkjets, they are sprayed onto a heated moving blanket belt.
This passes under all the colour heads, building up the image.
After the image is built up, the blanket travels a further
distance to allow the heat to evaporate the thin lm of water,
leaving just the resin coated pigment particles which in turn
partly melt to become sticky.

The blanket is then brought into contact with the cool paper
or plastic substrate, held on an impression cylinder. The resin
particles immediately solidify and adhere to the substrate,
peeling completely o the blanket to leave it clean. The clean
area of the blanket belt continues back around under the
ejectors for the next image to be built up. The benet of the
heated blanket and sticky resin, says Landa, is that it's
essentially a dry process at the point of transfer.

The biggest limitation on 'conventional' aqueous inkjet press

speeds is drying the ink, plus nding a paper coating that
doesn't absorb too much or too little water while it does so.
Nanographic printed sheets are dry immediately, so they're
ready for duplex printing and then downstream nishing
processes as soon as they hit the delivery.

No water on the paper also means that virtually any material

can be used, with no worries about special coatings. The ink
bonds to the top layer of paper bres without wicking very
far into them, so the dots remain sharp and the colours are
bright and consistent on most substrates.

Anyone familiar with the ElectroInk process used in HP Indigo

presses will start to feel dj vu at this point. ElectroInk uses
an electrophotographic imaging process rather than inkjet
'ejectors,' but the heated blanket (a cylinder in this case) and
peel-o ink lm transfer onto cool substrate sounds very
similar. Is the Landa process in reality an inkjet Indigo for the
21st century?

Well, up to a point. The nanometre scale pigment particles

are all-new and have a revolutionary eect on image quality,
Landa claims. They absorb a lot more light than conventional
pigment particles, which makes them very powerful colorants
with very good abrasion resistance. The ink lm on the
substrate is only 500 nm thick, so it takes on the same
surface appearance.

Controls for the iPad generation

The touch panel shows interactive displays of the machine
status, job lists, current job previews, and contextual touch
controls. This is an entirely new way of controlling a press.
Magnets are used to attach pull sheets from the press next to
visual displays of the job images. If the press is left
unattended, the display switches to large representations of a
few critical functions that can be seen from a distance: paper,
ink levels, job nished, and an unscheduled stop.

So how does it print?

So that's the theory. The reality isn't quite there yet. Landa
wasn't handing print
samples out, but it was displaying them behind Perspex, so
you could see them up close.
Most samples, as seen above, showed a few stripes or bands
due apparently to blocked jets, which should be curable. They
also had small white spots in shadow areas, suggesting
incomplete transfer of the ink from the belt. Clean transfer is
vital, so the company will certainly be working hard to get it
xed.

'We have to test, test, test,' says Mr Landa. 'We launched

Indigo in 1993 and were overwhelmed with orders. So we
built a factory and shipped it. We didn't have the money to
wait then. Now we can aord to wait to get it right, and then
ship.'

At present, he said, the presses can't handle variable data,

though that will be available when they ship. The front ends
appear to be based on Global Graphics' Harlequin RIPs.
Landa's three licensees seem likely to pursue dierent
implementations of the process, though all have signed up
for sheet fed and not web. Mr Landa says that manroland has
only taken a license to sell Nanographic presses to its
installed base, meaning it will not sell them to new users.

Landa's main interest in Nanography is manufacturing and

selling the NanoInk. 'The question is whether as a single
supplier you can guarantee good prices,' Mr Landa admits.
'The deal with the customer will be that these inks will make
this the lowest cost per copy of any digital print process.'

The company will sell NanoInk to Landa press customers

directly and also to its licensees (ie the three press makers
and any others that sign up in future) so they can resell it to
their customers. However, Landa will not sell ink to its
licensees' own customers, so there won't be any issue of
undercutting them on price, he said.

'Printing has only declined by about 2% in the past ve years,

but capital purchases have halved. The market is afraid to
buy new oset equipment in case it becomes obsolete. We
say oset is not obsolete, that Nanography is
complementary. It is a new order in the industry: the
suppliers are having to say I would rather help my customers
than hurt my competitors. This is the rst time that all the
main oset players have embraced the same digital
technology.'

Contact: www.landanano.com (http://www.landanano.com)

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