Mimaki offer attractively priced LED UV print and cut packages		12 October 2009
Customers can benefit from substantial savings when they order a Mimaki UJV-160 printer alongside either a Mimaki flatbed or pinch roll cutter - increasing productivity and delivering impressive workflow advantages too.

Mimaki's commitment to developing further new UV printers has been much in evidence with the introduction last year of the award winning UJV-160 and this machine is now available as part of a number of attractively priced print and cut packages. Mimaki manufacture a range of flatbed and pinch roll, wide format cutters, and the purchase of one of these in conjunction with the printer can save the buyer as much as almost £6,000.

The Mimaki UJV-160 is a 1.6m wide LED UV curing inkjet printer, capable of printing roll-to-roll or (using the supplied media tables) onto rigid board weighing up to 12kg and up to 10mm thick. The pioneering cold cure LED inks will stretch by up to 200%, as well as being capable of being cut through, creased and folded - making it a perfect solution for producing point of sale, packaging and wide format shaped graphics. Whilst the flexibility of the inks is ideally suited to printing banners and formable vinyl, adding an additional cutting table means the ease with which POS work can be output in-house is a very convincing proposition.

Rather than printing to roll fed material and then mounting it to a board before cutting it to shape; direct printing using the Mimaki UJV-160 removes this labour intensive process, and reduces the cost of the materials required too. Taking the printed board straight off the printer (without needing to leave time for curing or drying, as can be required on other machines) and cutting it in-house eliminates the potential for damage caused in transit, as well as making the whole process more cost effective and timely.

The Mimaki software suite - supplied as part of the package - helps tie this whole process together with a series of integrated and easy to use tools. Plugging in to CorelDRAW and Adobe Illustrator, Mimaki's FineCut program amalgamates the whole print and cut routine, ensuring flawless consistency of result; whatever the application. Various configurations of cutting plotter are on offer; from the Mimaki CG-160FX pinch roll cutter - suited to producing stickers and decals from printed vinyl - right up to the Mimaki CF2 range of flatbed machines that sport tangential and / or reciprocating heads for cutting through thick display substrates, corrugated materials and foam centred boards.

The Mimaki CF2-1218 has a 1.2m x 1.8m vacuum bed, and a variety of head configurations depending upon the customer's requirements. With its optical eye, it can detect registration marks and produce complex cuts around and through the print using a combination of cutting, creasing and scoring tools. A maximum downward pressure of 5kg from the tangential head allows a significant range of media to be cut, making it a very flexible instrument for the display graphics professional. The use of the optical eye also enables boards larger than the bed to be cut in segments; whilst still retaining its accuracy.

When purchased with the top of the range Mimaki CF2-1218TD, the bundle with the Mimaki UJV-160 saves almost £6,000 on the combined list price of the two separate models.

John de la Roche - National Sales Manager for Mimaki's UK & Ireland distributor, Hybrid Services Ltd, told us; "The breadth of Mimaki's product range makes it easy for us to combine and integrate workflows, and creating finished products on a combination of Mimaki equipment is made simpler with a workflow aided by the software that's included with the machines.

Investment in the UJV-160 alongside a CF2 could allow a graphics company to bring all elements of their production in-house, saving time, money and keeping control of the whole process."

In addition to these example packages, Mimaki also manufacturer a grand format flatbed LED UV machine - the new JFX-1631 - which can be run with their matching sized flatbed cutter / router, to produce work onto acrylic as well as aluminium based substrates and other plastics on a grand scale.