Replacing Domino CIJ with TIJ

Welcome to another episode of Printevention. A video series we are doing here at InkJet, Inc. to help customers and maybe future customers with their marking and coding needs.

We wanted to highlight a customer and an application that is pretty interesting, where the customer had to weigh CIJ and TIJ, which is continuous inkjet versus thermal inkjet.

We had a customer of ours that was initially and ink customer. InkJet, Inc. has been an ink manufacturer since 1989; we are 30 years old now. They have been an ink customer of ours for some time and they actually had a Domino CIJ printer in their plant and they are printing on hard plastic PET lids and bottles. We were putting InkJet, Inc. replacement ink into their Domino CIJ. While it worked, they were having a lot of problems with the printer itself. The printer was down more than it was up, which is not ideal, obviously.

We had talked with them about replacing their Domino CIJ with the InkJet, Inc. CIJ, which is called DuraCode, but they were so unhappy with all the abuse of the CIJ they had and the maintenance required and problems they were having, that we recommended that they look at our TIJ Pro-S.

The ANSER brand, (sold by InkJet, Inc. through an exclusive U.S. distributorship) produces a model called the Pro-S, which is a solvent-based TIJ and in many instances will combat or go up against a CIJ printer when maybe there isn’t that need for a higher speed (although ANSER TIJ printers CAN print at high speeds) or a continuous print and isn’t going to run 24 hours a day, 7 days a week but you still want that quality code…really at a fraction of the cost.

The Pro-S is quite compact, so it has a small footprint, much more affordable and often times fits within a maintenance budget, allowing you to avoid that capital expense compared to most CIJ costs.

The customer actually purchased the Anser Pro-S and replaced their Domino CIJ printer and are getting some pretty incredible results. Again, they are printing on a heavy PET bottle and cap, the line goes about 40 feet per minute and they printing three lines. It’s a normal environment, meaning there is nothing on the bottle like dust or condensation when it gets printed, so it is in a pretty ideal environment (for printing). The company is a dry spice company.

The bottles and lids are a non-porous substrate and people tend to think they need CIJ for that but this ANSER Pro-S model really holds its weight. It’s cartridge based and every cartridge is a brand new printhead. It turned out to be the perfect replacement for CIJ in this case.

Make sure that if you are looking into this type of thing, and you talk to our folks, you follow along with all of the application (and environment, and process) questions, because we tend to ask a lot of those because we want to make sure we are fitting into your process and your environment and what you need.