The future of production printing belongs to inkjet. Unlike toner printers and offset presses, this technology has the potential to mature and gain market share. In the past, inkjet was limited to small devices for use at home or in the office, because it was better suited to convenience than high-speed printing. Innovation in the industry has pushed inkjet to new levels of speed and efficiency, and it now provides a healthy middle ground between toner and offset by combining the best of both worlds.

Everything is going digital these days, and the same is true for printing. As consumer trends change, companies need the ability to respond with higher volumes and faster turnaround speeds, as well as personalised content that takes advantage of all the data they collect. While average job lengths are falling, the number of jobs is on the rise, which is incompatible with the way offset presses work. They take too long to set up, you can’t switch easily from one job to the next, and you can’t include variable data. Toner printers can do these things, but only for low-volume work, as the costs per page increase substantially once output exceeds a few thousand sheets.

Inkjet therefore emerged as the best alternative, bringing high speed and productivity to digital printing. At Kyocera, we have plentiful experience producing inkjet printheads, and our knowledge of the industry revealed an opportunity. We decided to enter the production printing market with the TASKalfa Pro 15000c, our first high-volume inkjet device that holds no punches in terms of speed and energy efficiency. Our ultimate goal is to make production printing more sustainable, enabling companies to internalise their operations affordably.

High output

The TASKalfa Pro 15000c is so fast it could give Usain Bolt a run for his money. Designed for speed, it’s capable of warming up from standby in just 60 seconds, meaning less time waiting and more time printing. For comparison, an offset press requires up to 20 minutes to prepare before you can start printing, because there are so many moving parts and settings to adjust. Can you imagine how much time you’d waste if you had to spend 20 whole minutes calibrating everything between one job and the next?

Once it’s warmed up, it takes less than 6 seconds to produce the first impression. On an offset device you’d have to wait a lot longer, and if there were any adjustments to make, you’d spend another 20 minutes setting it up again. The TASKalfa Pro 15000c prints the first sheet in under 6 seconds, so you can see everything’s in order and continue to print the other few thousand. The rest of the job will be finished before you know it, since the device is capable of producing 150 A4 sheets a minute.

These high speeds make the TASKalfa Pro 15000c extremely productive, capable of hitting output levels of 1,000,000 impressions a month. In terms of maintenance, inkjet devices are generally less prone to breakdowns than offset or toner because they have fewer moving parts. Although this is our first dedicated production print device, Kyocera has been supplying printhead technology to the biggest names in the industry for a long time. We invest all of our experience and expertise into every product, so when you see the Kyocera logo, you know you can rely on it to perform.