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February 2017 • The PCB Magazine 47 THE POWER OF THREE: SCHMOLL TALKS TECHNOLOGY Kunz: In the complete process, you may have some savings, but generally the DI system is slower than a conventional system. As you may know, a conventional system has quite a lot of power, so you can just flood it like hell, but the DI is limited in some respects. This means we have to bring the cycle times on the market that compete, but then, by concept, it is only one side, and the conventional system often does two sides at once. So there is a cycle time disad- vantage, basically—but we offer a much better quality. Matties: Yeah, reduction in handling and scrap and overall quality. Kunz: Yes. Matties: That's got to be a pretty tough sell. How expensive is a unit? For someone to invest in direct imaging, how much would they expect to invest? A quarter of a million dollars, or something along those lines? Kunz: It can be from that level up to one mil- lion, depending on the number of heads, throughput and automation levels. So I think there's no border for whatever you want to do, but the nice thing is that unlike two, three, four years ago, you can start a one-head system with $250,000−$300,000 and just get into the busi- ness and maybe only do part of your produc- tion where it's necessary or really beneficial. Whereas, early times you would have to spend at least double or three times. But now you have a good start up, for acceptable money. Matties: Is there anything that we haven't talked about that we should be discussing about direct image and solder mask? Kunz: F or solder mask, there are also some handling issues, because the boards are com- pletely different than photoresist work. Resist work usually has no holes inside. This means that in solder, the vacuum system is much more difficult. Our machine for solder is usu- ally equipped with some mechanical clamps. We have seen customers not using the vacuum at all and just clamping with the mechanical clamps because they have boards that are bad- ly bowed and the vacuum is not able to handle it. So there are different varieties, whereas with photoresist, there's one resist and it's done. You have bowed panels, panels with many holes, or panels with different colors. Solder mask is a completely different thing than doing resist work. Matties: It sounds like the mechanical is working just fine, though. Kunz: That's OK.