Next Generation Colour 3D Printing

By James Busby

Our good friends at Mimaki very kindly sent us a selection of our scans printed using their latest colour 3DUJ-553 printer. The printer uses a full-colour UV LED curing method that allows for up to 10 million possible colour combinations. Obviously, this has a lot of applications in various industries but what we were most interested in was seeing how this translated to digital humans. As you can see from the images below the results are fantastic! the color reproduction and resolution is a huge step up from anything that we've seen before. 

The scan used here is a version of our male 01 cleaned model which for those of you who are interested is available here.

Here are some useful links for you::

  

The printer has 3 print modes 20 , 32 and 42 micron layer thickness combined with 8 individual print heads for Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black Clear and 2 water soluble support materials. Here are the official specs 

Build Area (W × D × H) 20 x 20 x 12 inches (508 x 508 x 305 mm)
Max. Build Weight 154.3 lbs (70 kg)
Color Range More than 10 million
Print Mode / Resolution / Thickness Fast / 600 dpi / 42 micron Standard / 800 dpi / 32 micron High Quality 1270 dpi / 22 micron
Curing Water-cooled LED-UV lamps x 2
File Formats OBJ, STL, PLY, 3MF, VRML
Circulation Internal print head ink circulation
Interface Ethernet 1000 BASE-TX (Gigabit)
Safety standards VCCI Class A / FCC CLASS A / ETL (UL60950 compliant) CE marking (EMC Directive, Low Voltage Directive) / CB certification / RoHS compliant / REACH
Operational environment Temperature: 68 – 86 °F (20 - 30 °C) Humidity: 35 – 65% RH, non-condensing Accuracy guaranteed temp.: 68 – 77 °F (20 – 25 °C) 
Power Single-phase 100-240 VAC, ±10%, 50/60 Hz ±1 Hz ×3 (Main unit 1 / Monitor 1 / External PC 1)
Power consumption 1,630W or less (Total) 
Outer dimension (W × D × H) 88.6 x 59 x 61 inches (2250 x 1500 x 1550 mm) 
Weight 1323 lbs (600 kg)

 

The head scan shown below was captured using an earlier version of our T-180 capture stage using around 80 cameras just for the head. 

If you have any questions please feel free to comment in the box below.