中文Walk into almost any factory, gift shop or promotional-products business and you will hear the same frustrated wish: “I wish we could just print this, here, right now, without ordering a whole pallet of it.” Roland DG heard that wish loud and clear, and this week it answered with two new machines that point straight at the future of making things on demand.
The company has launched the VersaObject IO-300 and the VersaObject RC-300 Series, a pair of industrial UV printing solutions aimed at the growing hunger for high-mix, short-run manufacturing and product decoration. Together they cover two very different jobs: printing flat things with precision, and printing round things without losing your mind.
Let’s start with the IO-300. This is a flatbed UV printer built for industrial parts, product customisation and anything where accuracy, repeatability and durability actually matter. It uses newly developed printheads, advanced dot control and Roland’s latest UV ink tech, and it can hit production speeds of up to 37.6 square feet per hour in standard CMYK mode. The headline trick is multi-layer printing — stacking layers with tight alignment — which makes it a natural fit for control panels, nameplates, cosmetic packaging and promotional goods where every millimetre counts.
It is also strikingly versatile on materials. Polycarbonate, ABS, acrylic, PVC, glass, aluminium, stainless steel — the IO-300 will take a swing at all of them across a generous 30 by 20 inch print area. New EUV-H Hard Ink, tuned for industrial use, comes in CMYK plus white, primer and gloss. And because nobody wants to babysit a printer, Roland built in direct output control from the display and remote management through the Roland DG Connect app.
Then there is the RC-300 Series — two helical UV printers, the RC-300 and the RC-300c, designed to print directly onto cylindrical and tapered objects. Bottles, tumblers, drinkware, cans, promotional products, even pre-filled or pre-labelled clear bottles (that is the RC-300c’s party trick). No more wrestling with labels and sleeves and setup headaches. A medium-sized tumbler can be printed in about 60 seconds. Sixty. That is fast enough to make short runs, seasonal campaigns and limited editions genuinely profitable instead of a logistical nightmare.
Kevin Shigenoya, executive officer at Roland DG, framed it simply: businesses need production that “can adapt quickly to changing customer demands without compromising quality or profitability.” That is the whole game now. Customers want variety, speed and a personal touch, and traditional analog methods often choke on small batches and regional variants. Digital direct-to-object printing is the escape hatch.
What I like about this launch is that it is not just about speed for speed’s sake. It is about shrinking the distance between an idea and a finished object. A beverage brand can test a new bottle design without tooling. A cosmetics company can run a limited edition without a warehouse of inventory. A manufacturer can decorate parts in-house instead of shipping them out and hoping. That is less risk, less waste and faster learning — three things every business says it wants but rarely gets.
The RC-300 Series runs on EUV-H hard inks in CMYK, white, gloss and primer, with no custom tooling required, and it plays nicely with glass, PET, aluminium, steel and rigid plastics. Both machines ship with Roland’s software ecosystem, so the workflow — design, print, monitor — stays in one connected world.
Roland DG has been in this game a long time, and the IO-300 and RC-300 show a company betting that the next wave of growth is not about bigger runs but about smarter, more responsive ones. For print service providers hungry to add capabilities without blowing up their operation, these two might be exactly the door they were waiting for.
Source: WhatTheyThink — “Roland DG Expands Industrial Direct-to-Object Printing Portfolio with Launch of VersaObject IO-300 and RC-300 Series”
