Video Interview of Gregg Harwood Featuring X5-T High Throw Technology

Thank you Promo Impressions for the video interview of Gregg Harwood, Director of Digital Products & Global Services, at PRINTING United 2025 where he discusses our newest launch: the X5-T High Throw UV Flatbed Printer.

In this video Gregg walks us through the X5-T High Throw Technology’s specifications, features, and advantages for printing drinkware and other curved surfaces.

Watch the full video here: https://www.wideformatimpressions.com/video/single/using-the-inkcups-x5-t-high-throw-printer-for-drinkware/ 

Video Transcription:

I’m Gregg Harwood from Inkcups Corporation in Danvers, Massachusetts and we’re launching the X5-T High Throw. This technology is to print on drinkware and other products with an increased head gap distance. So being able to throw ink a little bit further than before.

So traditionally, you like to be around a 1 or 2 mm away from your product, but with buying product from overseas, many times you run into tolerance issues and deviations amongst the product itself, so this helps you overcome that. So by hovering the head a bit higher, maybe two or three times the initial height, you can actually maintain that image quality across the bed and you can handle that variation that you run into in production. In addition, you can print concave as well as convex. So around a curve, as well as in a recess. So it opens up a lot more applications than you might have been able to do traditionally with other printers. So by marrying up a special ink formula and waveforms, we’re able to achieve around a 25 or 30% wrap around a diameter, and even on a recess we’re able to achieve throw distances up to 10 mm.

Even from a straight walled type of mug, all the way to a tapered mug, we’re able to print and maintain the scale of the image, there is no distortion.  That’s all done through the software.

Big, small, it’s very important to have the correct jigs, to capture it and hold them level. So Inkcups does a great job with application work and really honing in on waveform and ink technology to get the best image quality and the biggest size.  So while others may try to achieve that, the size and the quality, especially on the edges, furthest away from the print heads, really is superior to the rest.

This is the premier decorating method for handles at the moment. You can’t really do 360 degrees, but it’s about as big as you can get on a handled mug, where the handle is not removable. As you can see it’s part of it. I think the shapes, people are diversifying themselves. You know, drinkware brands, promotional products companies, they diverse themselves from other competition, by changing the shape and geometry of the container, so the more difficult containers, have curves and more different features, are more difficult to print with traditional printing, or traditional digital printing, so by opening up the ability ot throw the ink a little bit further with high throw we can achieve some of those geometries that we weren’t able to achieve before.

Handled mugs is another trend, there are a lot of companies with handled drinkware out there. Traditionally you would screen print or pad print, but now, this gives you the ability to do shorter run, smaller jobs, in digital. Kind of a print on demand, type of process, instead of longer runs where you’re sort of married to that one artwork.