Fujifilm, Barberán to Develop Single Pass Inkjet to Sign and Display Market

Fujifilm announces joint development with Barberán to bring high quality, single pass inkjet to the global sign and display market

The two companies are working together to bring a new digital press to market in late 2023. This press will print at speeds of up to 6,000 square meters per hour, and a number of major sign and display businesses have already signed agreements to take the first machines.

Barberán has established itself as a leader in high-end, high productivity industrial presses for the corrugated market over the last ten years, with 30 customers in North America alone. This new partnership combines Barberán’s manufacturing expertise with Fujifilm’s knowledge of inkjet integration, ink chemistry and its extensive experience in the sign and display market.

The new press will print with a bespoke new Fujifilm ink and primer, developed at its award-winning factory in Broadstairs, UK, making it suitable for printing on a range of substrates, including plastic and particleboard.
At 30 meters in length and with an excellent built-in print engine, the machine will be able to print on all typical sign and display substrates, up to a width of 1.6 meters, at speeds of 6,000 square meters per hour.

“We choose our partners carefully and Barberán is no exception,” said David Burton, business and commercial director at Fujifilm WFIJ HQ. “We’ve been in close talks with them for more than two years because they have a huge amount of expertise in industrial print manufacturing and we saw an opportunity for a mutually beneficial relationship. They already have a single pass product that is proven in the corrugated sector, and we have the expertise to help them adapt it for the very different requirements of the sign and display market.

“Fujifilm has a huge market presence across the whole graphics sector, from analog to digital,” Burton continued. “It’s a market presence that spans commercial print and packaging, as well as sign and display which, of all the graphics sectors, has digitized most rapidly in the last two decades. We’ve played a key role in that transformation and, with this project, we can take that process a step further – supporting digitization for some of the highest volume sign and display production businesses in the world. We will be able to provide a path to digital transformation for businesses printing such massive volumes that (for now) offset processes often still make more economic sense.”

“We’re really excited to be bringing our technology to a whole new market,” Eladio Lerga, technical director of Barberán, added. “Fujifilm’s breadth of experience in print for sign and display will be crucial to this, as well as its expertise in inkjet ink chemistry and inkjet systems. Working together we can maintain our print speeds and quality, and adapt our systems to accommodate a much wider range of substrates and to meet the very different market requirements of this sector.”