Programme economics
The cost worksheet, the payback arithmetic and how the capital is structured, run on your own numbers.
Laser marking vs continuous inkjet
The swap off ink, decided by the numbers
Your line drops the ink, the solvent and the coder downtime that come with it. Both mechanisms and the full arithmetic sit below, so the swap is decided by your own numbers.
- No purge cycles, no viscosity checks, no head strip at 2am.
- The mark survives wash-down, weather and handling, every time.
- The code comes off your own ERP and PLC, so nobody types it in.
Why the coder gets replaced
Three things put a coder on the replacement list: what it costs, what it stops, and what happens when the mark will not read.
- Ink and make-up solvent are a permanent line item, and solvent evaporates while the coder just sits there.
- A blocked head stops the line at the worst possible moment, and the shift stands around waiting.
- A drifting print gets found at the distribution centre, not on your own floor.
- A label can fall off or move to the wrong item. A mark in the material cannot.
What it costs you
Five dimensions, in the language your own ledger already uses.
| What it costs you | Continuous inkjet | Laser |
|---|---|---|
| Consumable spend | Ink and make-up solvent, ordered, stored under flammable goods rules and disposed of. A permanent line item. | Electricity, plus a lens window and an extraction filter changed on a schedule set by your own line. |
| Downtime, and how it fails | It degrades before it stops: a faint character, a dropout, and the line keeps running. | It stops rather than degrades, so a bad mark is obvious at once, not found downstream. |
| Mark permanence | Sits on the surface. Scuffed, solvent wiped or abraded off over time. | Formed in the material itself, so it survives wash-down, weather and handling. |
| Capital cost | Low, and often written into a lease against ongoing ink supply. | Higher on day one. The saving comes from what stops being bought every month after. |
| Install effort | Mount the head, set standoff, load a message. Often done inside a day. | A machine installation: guarding, extraction, power and the tie-in to your line, staged and proven in Nelson before it ships. |
Laser is not one source
The wavelength is the variable that decides the answer, chosen once at specification. The full six-class matrix sits on the specifications page.
| Source class | Best suited to | What changes the decision |
|---|---|---|
| Fibre and MOPA, at about 1064 nm | Steel, stainless, aluminium and titanium, and many engineering plastics. | An annealed mark keeps the passive layer intact. An engraved mark cuts it and can corrode. |
| CO2, at 9.3 to 10.6 micron | Timber, board, acrylic, leather, and painted or coated surfaces. | It does not couple into bare metal, which reflects far more of the beam than it absorbs. |
| UV, at 355 nm | Glass, ceramics, PCBs and heat sensitive plastics, including packaging film. | The bond breaks photochemically, so there is next to no heat affected zone on thin film. |
How it runs on your line
Five checks against your own records, in order.
- Step 1
Total your coder's cost
Twelve months of ink and make-up, straight off the purchase ledger. Where it barely registers, the coder stays and the swap stops here.
- Step 2
Price one minute stopped
Ask operations or finance what one minute of that line is worth. Every downtime figure below gets multiplied by it.
- Step 3
Pull the stoppage log
Twelve months of stops filtered to the coder: cleans, purges, faults on restart. Multiply by the number from step two.
- Step 4
State what it must survive
Wash-down, years outdoors, repeated handling: state it plainly. Where the mark has to survive that, the laser is very likely already the specification.
- Step 5
Send us a part
Post it in the state it actually arrives in. You get back a numbered report with the parameters, the grade and the speed it held.
When ink is still specified
Three checks route a job to a coder, not a laser. Each is checkable in an afternoon, at the scope.
| Reason | What it means | What we specify |
|---|---|---|
| A mandated colour | A laser deposits nothing, so contrast is the material's own reaction, not a fixed brand colour. | An ink, a laser reactive coating at the converter, or a printed panel. |
| No usable reaction | PVC and some films give no safe response at any wavelength the job allows. | The capability study states which applies, on your own material. |
| Spend too small to repay capital | A line running a few hours a week buys too little ink to repay capital. | The arithmetic decides it before a meeting does. |
| A coder mid-life and working | The money is spent and the schedule is running, so the sensible change point is later. | The trigger is written into the scope: the stoppage rate that flips the arithmetic. |
The two mechanisms, in full
For the engineer and the maintenance lead. Both technologies end to end, then the safety picture and the fallback.
How continuous inkjet works
Ink is pumped under pressure through a fine nozzle. A piezoelectric crystal vibrates the nozzle, so the stream breaks into a train of uniform droplets at tens of kilohertz. Each droplet passes a charge electrode, which charges it or leaves it neutral, then passes between two high voltage deflection plates. Charged drops are deflected onto the product and build a dot matrix character as the product moves past. Uncharged drops fly straight into a gutter and return to the ink system.
Where the ink goes
Because the ink is exposed to air in that circuit, solvent evaporates continuously and has to be replaced. Make-up is a separate consumable from ink for that reason. The head sits at a set standoff from the product. Nozzle, charge electrode, deflection plates and gutter all need periodic cleaning, because ink builds up on every one of them. The printer is normally purged and shut down cleanly, not simply switched off.
Where inkjet costs you
That design is more than fifty years old. It is very well understood, and it is fast. It is also a fluid handling machine sitting on a production line. Every failure mode comes back to the fluid: a partial blockage, a contaminated electrode, drops landing slightly off, a restart after a bad shutdown.
How thermal transfer works
A thermal print head presses a wax or resin ribbon against film or label stock, and melts pigment onto it, typically at 300 dpi. That resolution is the point: it prints small text, graphics and dense 2D codes on flexible packaging cleanly. The consumable is the ribbon. Ribbon is consumed by the length of the print stroke, regardless of how much of the code is actually inked, so cost tracks print area, not characters.
Where thermal transfer fits
The print head is a wear part, with a rated life and a real replacement cost. The waste stream is spent ribbon: a solid, not a solvent, and easier to handle for it. Thermal transfer belongs on flexible film and label stock, where resolution and graphics are the requirement, and we specify it there. It is the wrong tool on a raw timber, metal or moulded part.
Fire, dust and Class 4
The mark is a controlled thermal process inside an enclosure with extraction on it, and the extraction is part of the scope. Enclosure, interlocks, beam containment and a rated safety circuit are specified to IEC 60825-1 and ISO 11553-1.
If the laser stops
Three answers, and they are commercial choices, not technical ones. Hold critical spares on site against the parts that would actually stop the line. Keep the existing coder in place for an agreed period after cutover. Or specify two heads where the line genuinely cannot stop.
For the rest of the committee
This gets decided by more people than were on the call.
Start here
Engineering specifications
The source selection matrix, the material compatibility matrix and the full measured speed model.
Integration architecture
How the Control Layer reads your ERP and PLC, connection by connection, with the failure edge stated for each.
Programme assurance
The document set, the acceptance gates and the handover pack that closes out the swap.
Send us a part
Post the part in the condition it actually arrives in: wet, dirty, resinous, whatever it really is. Tell us what it has to survive afterwards. You get back a numbered report with the parameter set, the verification grade and the speed the mark held at, before anything is committed.
Last updated August 21, 2026