IIJ breaks new ground with digital wallpaper production

Industrial Inkjet Ltd (IIJ) announces the unveiling their new digitally printable wallpapers. Unpacked at the recent Heimtextil 2017 show organised at Frankfurt am Main, Germany. Experts from IIJ and Konica Minolta Industrial Inkjet scrutinized the wallpapers to see their competency and products are printable at linear speeds of up to 70m/min. For the past 18 months, the two companies have been working on a solution that can compete with conventional printing methods on both productivity and cost-per-roll. Printing of wallpaper using inkjet is quite common, but speeds today are very low and the technology is restricted to short-run “special” applications such as mural walls.

According to IIJ, wallpaper printing is about to see a massive shift to digital technology thanks to the improvements in inkjet capability. Ink performance and cost, print width and speed are all now within reach. When the company started, the main difficulty was in developing an ink that meets all of the requirements from the wallpaper industry. It’s not just the appearance, the ink has to work on a very wide range of common wallpaper media and it has to meet standards for emissions and wash and scrub tests.