When we arrived at the International Sign Expo Convention, a crowd had already formed around the Canon booth. We joined the crowd for the first presentation of the Oce Colorado 1640 wide format printer.

The printer looks impressive with a black see through casing on top, cylindrical ink canisters on the side and a wide rectangular casing that goes to the floor. Inside it uses a completely new printing technology called UVgel. With UVgel printing, the ink has a viscosity similar to hair gel when it’s at room temperature. The ink maintains this viscosity from the cartridge and through the tubes leading to the print head. Once the ink reaches the print head, it is heated into a liquid as it is applied to the poster paper. This results in very accurate prints at very fast speeds.

The booth showcased many example prints on different mediums such as canvas photo prints, banners, and both matte and gloss custom posters. The images were high quality and similar to what you would expect from an inkjet or giclee printer.

An interesting feature of the Colorado is an acoustic print head checking system that pings each nozzle before every printing pass. If there is a problem, the printer knows it before it happens, and can compensate for the clogs before misprinting.

The Colorado has two media rolls and can use a wide range of media such as canvas, vinyl, and poster paper. The speed for high quality production runs is very good - it’s not quite as fast as the HP Pagewide Printer, but it offers a much higher quality print.

Below is a segment of the presentation at the Sign Expo in Las Vegas on 4/20/2017.

The Colorado 1640 is not yet in production, so we look forward to evaluating the production models once they are ready.