Since its launch, the Xaar 1003C printhead has been adopted by many ceramic tile manufacturers around the world – and has become integral to their tile production processes. Among these is Parefeuille Provence: in order to create high-quality granite and concrete tile designs, the French company installed an EVOSEVEN digital printer from Projecta Engineering equipped with five print bars populated with Xaar 1003 GS12C printheads – and has been delighted with the results.

“The big evolution we see with the Xaar 1003C is the significant reduction in maintenance and downtime,” comments production manager Laurent Jacquemin. “We have seen a three-times improvement in the cleaning cycle compared with the Xaar 1002C, and when we do stop for maintenance, the cleaning process is fully automatic and only takes one minute.”

“All of this results in significantly more production uptime and consequential efficiencies and savings and due to the success of this installation we have decided to install a second digital printer this year to upgrade one of the remaining non-digital lines.”

Similarly, Oscar Ceramics in Italy adopted the Xaar 1003C printhead for digital ceramic tile decoration in 2016 – and the printhead has since played an important role in the company’s efficiency drive by helping to dramatically improve production uptime and throughput, while also delivering exceptional print quality onto the tiles.

“With this new printhead I have dramatically decreased machine downtime, as printhead maintenance is required only once or twice in every 24 hours,” explains Andrea Porta, chief designer at Oscar Ceramics. “This means I can increase production significantly. We have hundreds of designs, hundreds of products, hundreds of images in production. All my pictures, all my designs, all my work is safe with the Xaar 1003C.”

The Xaar 1003C printhead features Xaar’s Tuned Actuator Manufacturing. This ensures full scalability with a simple and quick set up, streamlining printhead replacement, and achieves consistent print quality across long print bars with multiple printheads, at different greyscale levels. 

Like its predecessors in the range, the Xaar 1003C combines Xaar’s patented TF Technology with its Hybrid Side Shooter architecture so that ink is recirculated at very high flow rates in the industry – directly past the back of the nozzle during drop ejection. This ensures that the printhead operates reliably even in the harshest industrial environments.