Textile Printing
Adalberto Estampados (Portugal) invests in SPGPrints PIKE Printer at ITMA 2015
Tuesday 24. November 2015 - SPGPrints announces the sale of its new PIKE single-pass digital inkjet printer to Adalberto Estampados, of Rebordões, Portugal.
The PIKE investment will enable Adalberto, which supplies European fashion houses with in-house and private-label collections, to offer a wider range of designs and boost digital output by a factor of five.
Mário Jorge Machado, CEO of Adalberto Estampados, comments: “We were looking for a printer that would strengthen our flexibility to supply a diversity of more sophisticated designs at short notice. In the trials at SPGPrints’ Netherlands headquarters, PIKE met our quality and productivity expectations admirably. Uniquely for a digital printer, it delivered exceptional results when reproducing both geometrical designs and blotches, with sharp edges and colour uniformity over large spot areas demonstrated on fabrics, including cotton and silk.”
The 1850mm-wide PIKE is based on a full-width array of Fujifilm Samba print elements, incorporated in a highly accurate but user-friendly print-bar technology, and an ink conditioning and ink delivery system, called ‘Archer’. PIKE’s 43 Fujifilm Samba print heads per colour, using Archer Technology, deliver variable dot sizes (2-10pl) at 1200 x 1200dpi resolution. A gap of up to 4mm between the print heads and the substrate enables many fabric textures to be printed using specially formulated mist-eliminating PIKE Reactive inks.
Adalberto Estampados has an annual output of 10 million metres with several digital and conventional printing and finishing machines in-house. Scheduled to go into full operation by the second half of 2016 at Adalberto, PIKE will be the company’s first continuous inkjet machine. Printing at over 1,000m/hour, PIKE is faster than the company’s conventional machines and offers more than double the speed of existing equipment.
“We work on the market where time to market is vital and having the right products on the shelves is significantly more important than unit costs, especially for our European customers,” says Mr. Machado. “PIKE significantly boosts our responsiveness and creativity, giving us the potential to bring new ideas to market within three or four weeks.”