中文Graph-Tech USA arrived at Loupe Americas 2026 in Chicago with a clear message: industrial inkjet is moving off the laboratory bench and onto the production floor at serious speed. At booth 6133 the company demonstrated its new eZ-Inkjet 65x, an industrial drop-on-demand printer shown live as it printed and encoded tags on the RFIDRunner, combining high-speed digital printing with RFID encoding and verification in a single, integrated workflow.
The eZ-Inkjet 65x is the latest evolution of a proven platform. It builds directly on the eZ-Inkjet 54, the flagship of the Graph-Tech USA portfolio, a system with hundreds of installations worldwide across card manufacturing, labelling, mailing and variable-data applications. Rather than reinventing the architecture, Graph-Tech focused on the parts of the printer that most affect a converter’s daily throughput: the printhead, the ink path and the usable print width.
The most significant engineering change sits at the nozzle. The 65x introduces ink recirculation directly at the printhead, a design choice that improves jet stability, reduces routine maintenance and supports longer uninterrupted production runs. Recirculation keeps the ink homogeneous and the nozzles primed, which matters in environments where a single clogged jet can mean scrapped batches and reworked rolls.
Flexibility was clearly a design goal. The system supports both UV-curable and water-based inks and can jet downward, sideways or upward, allowing it to drop into a wide range of industrial production lines without bespoke mechanical rework. At 600 DPI with a single drop, the printer reaches speeds of up to 758 feet per minute, or roughly 231 metres per minute, placing it firmly in the territory of high-volume roll-to-roll and inline applications.
Print width grew as well. Markus Portmann, president of Graph-Tech USA, explained the leap in concrete terms. “With the new eZ-Inkjet 65x, we have taken a proven industrial platform and introduced significant advances in printhead technology, including more than double the firing frequency, from 45 kHz to over 90 kHz, and a 20 percent wider print swath, from 54mm to 65mm,” he said. “This represents an important step forward for GTUS in providing our customers greater productivity and flexibility while maintaining the reliability and print quality they expect.”
Portmann framed the product as more than an incremental upgrade. “The eZ-Inkjet 65x also provides an alternative for customers looking to replace legacy high-speed inkjet systems, while offering the benefits of modern piezo drop-on-demand technology,” he noted. For operations running ageing continuous or thermal inkjet lines, that positioning is deliberately attractive: a path to modern piezo performance without abandoning existing line layouts.
On the software side, the printer is compatible with GTUS’s new eZ-Editor and can be integrated with the GTUS Controller, which runs on Windows 11 and incorporates SuperTracker technology for job and data management. That integration keeps the operator inside a familiar environment rather than forcing a new control philosophy onto the plant floor.
The live RFIDRunner demonstration was the centrepiece. The RFIDRunner uses a triple-Impinj architecture with dedicated modules for TID identification, encoding and multiple quality and data verification checks, helping guarantee data integrity on every tag while minimising waste and consumable usage. In practice the system encodes and prints up to 10,000 UHF RFID tags in under 12 minutes. Together, the two technologies show how GTUS is blending high-speed digital printing with reliable RFID processing to enable efficient variable-data production.
That capability is not merely technical showmanship. Graph-Tech says the system supports retailer RFID compliance mandates, including Walmart’s RFID initiative, while reducing floor space and labour requirements compared with traditional production methods. As large retailers push suppliers toward item-level tagging, the ability to print and encode at this speed, inline, becomes a competitive requirement rather than a nice-to-have.
Graph-Tech USA also used the show to highlight the LabelRunner, a digital imprinting system for labels and booklets built on the Rosas Maschinenbau Gazelle II platform and integrated with the eZ-Colorjet industrial inkjet printer. Designed for industrial-level UV label printing, LabelRunner targets the growing demand for the productivity, substrate flexibility and durability of UV inkjet at an accessible price point.
Taken together, the Loupe Americas demonstrations sketch a coherent strategy: take well-understood industrial printing problems, attack them with incremental but meaningful hardware advances, and wrap the result in software that operators already understand. For converters weighing a move toward higher-speed, more flexible inkjet, the eZ-Inkjet 65x is a serious contender worth a closer look.
The broader context helps explain the timing. Retailer RFID mandates have moved from pilot to requirement, and suppliers that cannot tag at line speed risk losing shelf space. Industrial inkjet, long constrained by reliability worries, has matured to the point where recirculating printheads and piezoelectric precision make high-volume, high-up-time operation realistic. For Graph-Tech USA, the 65x is also a statement of positioning: rather than chasing the widest possible feature set, it is doubling down on the narrow, demanding niche of variable-data and RFID production where uptime and data integrity matter more than raw colour gamut. That focus mirrors a wider shift in industrial printing, where the winners are increasingly specialists who deeply understand one workflow rather than generalists offering everything. The competitive field includes both traditional coding-and-marking suppliers and newer inkjet specialists, and the differentiator is rarely the printhead alone but the surrounding software, verification and integration story. Graph-Tech’s decision to wrap the 65x in its eZ-Editor and GTUS Controller, and to demonstrate it live with the RFIDRunner, signals that it understands this. Converters evaluating the system should look beyond the spec sheet to the total workflow, because in RFID production the cost of a mis-encoded tag is far higher than the cost of a misprinted one.
