Although pitched at carton preprint, a new 2.8 metre-wide inkjet web demonstrates what might be achieved for publishers when two industry leaders work closely together.

The HP PageWide Web Press T1100S shown to industry and media last week is the product of the latest between HP and KBA-Digital & Web Solutions. And what is being touted as "the world's most productive inkjet web" includes newly-developed technologies which might have applications in newspaper printing.

Developed in less than two years, the T1100S was shown to an audience of almost 200 at KBA's headquarters in Würzburg, Germany, last week. It optimises the use of inkjet printing for the liner preprint used in corrugated packaging, one of the segment's fastest-growing markets, and has already found customers.

One is what is being called 'multilane print architecture', a system that splits the web-width into short-run and long-run 'lanes'. Multiple ultra-short or short runs can be queued and printed together, with no makeready or press stops in between, while a long run is printed in another lane.

Running at up to 183 metres per minute, it prints 30,600 m² an hour on uncoated and coated liner stock ranging 80-400 gsm using primers, including a combination of HP's bonding and priming agents and four-colour pigmented aqueous inks, plus optional KBA varnish coating.

KBA chief executive Christoph Müller recalled how the collaboration began over an evening meal in September 2013, and was underway before contracts were signed, "proof of our mutual trust". It combines KBA's 200 years of press engineering and know-how in handling sensitive substrates and large web widths, and HP's global role in hard and software for 76 years, and 31 years of "pushing innovation in thermal inkjet technology forward".

Pictured (from top) Industry and media view the new press; (from left) Jim Lucanish (president of O'Neil Data Systems), Christoph Müller (KBA-Digital & Web Solutions), Aurelio Maruggi, Gido van Praag and Eric Wiesner from HP Inc celebrate the American-German cooperation; (bottom) a close look at the MLPA technology