An inkjet printer is a digital printing system that creates images by depositing tiny droplets of ink onto a substrate in precise patterns. In industrial printing, inkjet printers are designed for high-volume, high-speed output far beyond the capabilities of home or office devices.
Inkjet printers are often associated with desktop or office environments, where they are valued for convenience and low entry cost. However, production inkjet printing systems are defined by operating on an entirely different scale to support continuous operation, a longer service life, and predictable performance under demanding production conditions.
Rather than printing individual sheets intermittently, industrial inkjet printers are typically integrated into full, end-to-end production lines, handling large volumes of work with minimal interruption. This upscaling of the more familiar printing technology transforms inkjet from a convenience technology into vital manufacturing process.
What is the difference between a home inkjet printer and a production inkjet press?
Inkjet printers are often associated with desktop or office environments, where they are valued for convenience and low entry cost. Production inkjet printing systems operate on an entirely different scale, supporting continuous operation, longer service life, and predictable performance under demanding production conditions.
Rather than printing individual sheets intermittently, industrial inkjet printers are typically integrated into full commercially viable production platforms, handling large volumes of work with minimal interruption. The Truepress JET presses combine a suite of technologies from proprietary SC+ water-based inks, Near-Infrared drying, simplified colour management, inline inspection, and full workflow integration through EQUIOS to place millions of microscopic droplets unto paper traveling at high speeds ranging from 150 metres per minute or 225 m/min for lower resolution work.
A desktop inkjet might print 20 pages per minute on A4 paper. A production continuous inkjet presses like SCREEN’s Truepress JET 520HD printing at full capacity on a roll of paper up to 520 mm wide at a true resolution of 1200 x 1200 dots-per-inch. That’s the equivalent of potentially thousands or even millions of A4 pages a month.
This upscaling of the more familiar printing technology transforms inkjet from a convenience technology into a vital manufacturing process.
What are the main types of inkjet technology?
Industrial inkjet printing uses two fundamentally different jetting methods: Drop-on-Demand (DoD) and Continuous Inkjet (CIJ). The distinction matters because it determines what each system can do, what substrates it can handle, and what applications it serves.
Drop-on-Demand (DoD) ejects ink droplets only where the image requires them. No ink is wasted on non-image areas. Within DoD, there are two subtypes: piezoelectric (which uses a crystal that deforms under voltage to push ink out mechanically) and thermal (which boils a thin layer of ink to create a vapour bubble that forces a droplet out). Piezo DoD ìs the primary methods used in industrial production because it supports a wider range of ink chemistries, offers longer printhead lifespan, and achieves the droplet precision required at production speeds.
Continuous Inkjet (CIJ) jets a constant stream of ink and deflects unwanted droplets into a gutter for recirculation. CIJ is primarily used in coding and marking applications, such as printing batch numbers on bottles and expiry dates on packaging, rather than full-colour production. This is distinct from continuous inkjet printing that primarily refers to how the paper substrate is fed into the press engine continuously from a large roll of paper and not how the ink is jetted.
What are the key components of an industrial inkjet press?
An industrial inkjet press is not a single device but an integrated system. The major components include the printheads, ink delivery, substrate transport, drying, workflow software, and inline finishing, all working together to maintain quality at production speeds.
Printheads: The array of piezoelectric nozzles that deposit ink onto the substrate. Industrial printheads contain hundreds to thousands of nozzles per inch, each capable of firing droplets as small as 2 picolitres at frequencies above 100 kHz. SCREEN’s Truepress JET series uses greyscale printheads that produce multiple droplet sizes from each nozzle, enabling smoother tonal reproduction than binary (on/off) jetting.
Ink delivery: The system that maintains ink at the correct temperature, viscosity, and pressure for consistent jetting.
Substrate Web: The mechanism that moves paper or film through the press at constant speed and tension. In continuous inkjet presses, this is a roll-to-roll web transport system.
Drying: The system that fixes ink to the substrate immediately after printing using heated rolls, air blades, or unique solutions like SCREEN’s NIR or Carbon drying technology.
Workflow software: The platform that manages the entire production process from file intake to finished output. SCREEN’s EQUIOS incorporates the Adobe PDF Print Engine for native PDF processing, automated colour management, imposition, JDF communication with finishing equipment, and PDF/VT support for variable data.
How did Inkjet Printing Become an Industrial Technology?
Inkjet printing first gained traction as a digital alternative to analogue processes by offering flexibility and variable data capability: the ability to print each page differently without needing physical plates or cylinders to create the image. Advances in printhead design, ink chemistry, and workflow software then expanded its role into full-scale industrial production.
The first production-scale inkjet presses appeared in the 1990s, targeting transactional printing (bank statements, utility bills) where each page contained unique variable data that made traditional plate-based printing impractical. The breakthrough came in the 2000s when piezoelectric printhead technology, combined with greyscale (multi-droplet) jetting and faster data processing, pushed inkjet quality and speed into territory previously occupied by offset lithography.
SCREEN has been manufacturing high-speed inkjet presses since 2000 its first digital inkjet presses the TruePress 544 and TruePress V200. Since then, this technology has expanded with new ink formulations, faster drying technology, and more robust engineering for more stable output with more than 800 systems installed worldwide.
This evolution reflected across the industry marked the transition of inkjet printing from a supplemental digital option to a mainstream industrial production technology.
What Industries Use Production Inkjet Printers?
Production inkjet printing serves a range of sectors, each with different requirements but a common need for high-volume digital output with variable data capability.
Direct Mail: Fully personalised marketing pieces with individual addresses, imagery, and offers. Variable data printing at production speed is a core strength of continuous inkjet. EQUIOS’s smart VDP processing renders shared page elements once and caches them for reuse, maintaining speed even with high-volume personalisation.
Transactional Printing: Bank statements, invoices, utility bills, and insurance documents. Every page contains unique data, often with full-colour marketing content added alongside (known as transpromo).
Book Production: Short-run and print-on-demand books, from single copies to runs of several thousand. Inkjet eliminates the setup costs that make short runs uneconomical on offset.
Pharmaceutical: Regulated leaflets for medicines requires readable texts printed at high speeds on thin papers, and as regulations continuously change and formulations must be updated, the capability for digital inkjet to update printed data without the waste of analogue printing plates or startup waste.
Labels: Food, beverage, pharmaceutical, and cosmetics labels printed on film and paper substrates with UV-curable inks and inline die-cutting. SCREEN’s Truepress LABEL 350UV SAI S serves this market with production-speed UV inkjet on a range of label materials.
Flexible Packaging: Food-safe printing on film substrates for pouches, wrappers, and sachets, using water-based inks that comply with food contact regulations. SCREEN’s Truepress PAC 830F addresses this with water-based DoD technology for packaging-grade output.
The Future of Industrial Inkjet Printing
As printing markets continue to evolve, the common inkjet printer definition accepted among the industry is changing as production-scale digital printers are increasingly positioned as long-term manufacturing equipment rather than transitional technologies.
Ongoing development is focused on meeting new and emerging pressures from the sector including improving sustainability with water-based inks that minimise energy consumption and print-on-demand processes reducing ink and paper waste, or addressing labour shortages with new automation solutions like pre-defined job templates and intuitive touchscreen interfaces.
These trends reflect broader industry pressures and the need for more responsive manufacturing models. Inkjet printing is well suited to these demands because it combines digital control with scalable production.
Within the industrial inkjet landscape, manufacturers such as SCREEN have played a significant role in advancing inkjet from early digital systems to full-scale production platforms. Today, industrial inkjet printing stands as a central pillar of modern print production, offering the flexibility of digital processes with the performance expected of production manufacturing systems.