Photographic Color, Printed Direct Onto Tall Rigid Goods
Tall, rigid, three-dimensional goods are the awkward case for traditional decoration. Pad and screen printing each need dedicated tooling — a cliché or a screen per color, per design — so short, personalized runs carry setup cost and lead time out of proportion to the order, and every added color is another setup and another chance for waste.
Flatbed inkjet removes the tooling, but most flatbeds are built for thin, flat stock and can’t fit a tall object between bed and printheads — leaving a decorator choosing between a process that costs too much to set up and a machine that won’t physically accept the part.
EPS deployed a flatbed industrial inkjet system in an extended-height configuration. The defining feature is vertical clearance: the bed drops far enough to accept rigid objects up to 19 inches tall and present their top face to the printheads. The part simply stands on the bed — no fixture tooling, no cliché, no screen — and the carriage indexes across the top, laying down a full-color image in a single setup.
The system prints CMYK through a Gen5-class industrial printhead array with on-carriage LED-UV cure, so each pass is pinned and the part comes off the bed touch-dry. Because the image is driven straight from a digital file, switching designs is a file change, not a tooling change — which is what makes short, personalized, photographic work economical on rigid goods.
The tall part stands on the bed
The tall rigid part stands upright on the bed — no fixture or cliché — and the bed lowers to open the vertical gap most flatbeds lack, accepting objects up to 19 inches tall.
CMYK across the top face
The carriage indexes across the top face, laying down CMYK at 1200 × 600 dpi directly from the digital file — no plates, no screens, no transfers.
On-carriage LED-UV pins each pass
The on-carriage LED-UV lamp — the blue glow beside the heads — pins each pass as it prints, so the part comes off the bed touch-dry.
Photographic color, direct to the part
A full-color photographic image sits directly on the top of the rigid part — skin tones, saturated color, and fine shadow detail intact — for about six cents of ink.
Full-color CMYK, direct to object
Photographic artwork printed straight onto the part — no screens, no clichés, no transfers.
Fits tall rigid goods
Extended-height (deep-platen) clearance accepts objects up to 19 inches tall that conventional flatbeds can't.
Production-quality detail
1200 × 600 dpi unidirectional — a 260 × 200 mm image in about 1:30, with photographic skin tones and shadow detail.
About a nickel an image
Roughly $0.056 of ink per image — short, personalized, photographic runs become economical.
No tooling, file-driven
Switching designs is a file change, not a cliché or screen build — short runs carry no setup penalty.
Lowest total cost on tall, short-run, full-color
The right tier for tall rigid full-color work is a multi-pass flatbed with extended-height clearance.
Engineering a decoration challenge on tall or rigid goods?
Tall, rigid, full-color, short-run breaks most decoration processes on cost or geometry. Engineer the clearance, drive the image from a file, and the tooling disappears. Bring us the part.