Kyocera develops world’s fastest inkjet printhead

KJ4 Series 
The enhanced technology offers high-speed, high-resolution, full-colour printing at 150 million dots per second. This is Kyocera Corporation’s fastest inkjet printhead in the world—KJ4 Series. Each of 2,656 nozzles in the printhead ejects ink at up to 60,000 dots per second (at 60kHz drive frequency).

Kyocera’s previous inkjet printhead offered the world’s fastest print speed when it was introduced in 2008—150 meters per minute at 600×600dpi resolution, using a drive frequency of 30kHz. And this newly developed KJ4 Series sets new records for high-resolution, full-colour inkjet printing, offering fastest print speeds in any of three resolutions: 600×360dpi (330m/min at 40kHz), 600×600dpi (200m/min at 40kHz) and 1200×1200dpi (150m/min at 60kHz).

The new technology enabling this development was achieved by enhancing the drive frequency with Kyocera’s unique elemental technology making the interior ink channels more compact, optimising the nozzle configuration and improving the water-repellent coating on the nozzle surface to prevent clogging, thus ejecting the ink more accurately. In addition to speed, it provides the high resolution required in the commercial printing market, with a 50 percent improvement in ink-drop placement accuracy over the company’s previous model.