Machine Spotlight - EFI Quantum LXr5
Tipping the scales at nearly 6 tons, eight and a half meters wide and two and half tall, the Quantum LXr5 dominates Ottimo's 450m2 main print room.
"It's a beast," admits Lee Crew, Ottimo Digital's co-director, surveying the enormous EFI Quantum LXr5 stretching away into the distance. This colossus can produce 230m2 of high definition full-colour print every hour on a 5.2m wide roll of almost any material and is the capital ship in Ottimo's fleet of wide-format printers. Despite being able to output billboard-sized prints, the richness of colours and definition is better than most dedicated desktop photo printers, making it perfect for exhibition walls and graphics.
"We first installed it in 2017," said co-director Nick Lindwall, "but as you can imagine we were careful in our choice. We knew we needed a high-quality roll-to-roll UV printer that could produce 4-meter high exhibition graphics in a single piece. After some detailed research, we attended a demo of the Quantum LXr5 in Belgium, where we immediately saw the benefits this machine would offer us, not just in terms of size, quality and speed, but also in streamlining our exhibition print service to be able to offer extremely quick turnarounds for our clients."
The Quantum LXr 5 features a built-in cutter, meaning that with the right designs the machine can produce finished graphics straight off the roll, greatly increasing throughput, and freeing up the cutting table for more intricate or complex work.
As a UV printer, the Quantum works by depositing microscopic inks onto the printing material, but unlike solvent printers where the ink simply dries and the solvent evaporates, UV printers use ink that, like resin, cures in the presence of ultraviolet light. So the printer prints and cures the ink in one operation. This has many advantages, and some limitations - it allows designs to be printed on almost any substrate, it's an extremely fast process, the process is much less prone to smearing and smudging -saving on reprints and time, and the colours are vibrant and lightfast.
"It's a complex machine," says Lee, "but even during our training sessions we were able to produce flawless client work, and since then the LXr 5 has been the mainstay of our exhibition graphics workflow."
"And versatile," adds Nick, "there's an enormous range of inks and substrates for special applications, delivering creative opportunities for our clients we weren't able to offer before. As the first UK operator of the Quantum LXr5, we've been using it for four years and it absolutely ticks the boxes for exhibition graphics production, enabling us to deliver at scale with faster turnaround times than previously possible. As an investment, it's been a great success too."