Pulse — 2026-08-23.

The lead

Kornit’s Apollo runs up to 400 impressions an hour. Printweek’s hands-on test came out at roughly one shirt every nine seconds, and that second number is the one worth taking into a shift plan. Pretreat is wet-on-wet and inline. Drying is Tesoma hybrid, also inline. All of it checks out against the official spec and against the test.

Inline pretreat and inline drying mean fewer places for a garment to sit, wait or get handled. Whether that changes anything in your building depends on your layout, your operator count and how much of the day currently goes on moving work between stations rather than printing it. Run the arithmetic against your own throughput before anyone quotes 400 at you as a promise. Impressions per hour and finished garments per shift are not the same measurement, and the gap between them is where shop floors lose money. Printweek

Signals

Heidelberg says the year started well. Ask for the figures. HEIDELBERG reports starting FY 2026-27 on strong footing. That is the whole of what the queue carries: a headline, a fiscal year, a source. We have tagged it CHECK, because a press manufacturer’s framing of its own quarter is a claim until the numbers sit next to it. If you have a Heidelberg quote open or a service contract up for renewal, the useful question is not how the year started but what the order book does to lead times on your configuration. Read it, then ask your rep for the figures. meprinter.com

FESPA on AI in the estimating seat. FESPA has published a piece on AI-powered cost estimation, pitched at making digital printing and signage more profitable. The queue holds the headline and the link, no worked example and no named system, so treat it as a starting point rather than a finding. The question to bring to it: what does producing an estimate cost you now, in minutes and in mistakes, and would anything automated still be checked by the person who checks it today? Take one real job and one real quote. Test the argument against those before you test it against a demo. fespa.com

Where the growth is supposed to come from. meprinter frames it as print’s next growth move in the global printing market. Headline only in our queue: no segment named, no figure, no region. It is tagged market rather than market CHECK because it reads as analysis, not as a company talking about itself. Worth ten minutes if you are deciding where next year’s capex goes, less so if you are trying to get this week’s work out of the door. Growth stories rarely tell you which of your own lines to feed. Read it with your job mix open. meprinter.com

Canon and RSBC put tactile print in a gallery. Canon has partnered with RSBC on a tactile photography exhibition. The queue tags it tech, and the tag is right: tactile output is a production problem before it is anything else. No press named in the material we have, no substrate, no run length, no tolerances. A shame, because those are exactly the details a shop would want. If you take on raised or textured work, or turn it away because nobody in the building has costed it, the write-up is the cheapest look at what a finished job holds up as. meprinter.com

Verdict of the week

Claim: The Kornit Apollo prints up to 400 pieces per hour, with wet-on-wet pretreat and inline drying. Rating: ✓ Confirmed Why: The official figure is up to 400 impressions per hour, and a hands-on test put it at a shirt every nine seconds or so. Inline pretreat and Tesoma hybrid drying both check out. The word to watch is impressions, which is not a synonym for pieces. Printweek

Dates

• Sep 27, 2026 — EmpCo: ban on unsubstantiated “eco-friendly”
• Dec 30, 2026 / Jun 30, 2027 — EUDR: due diligence obligations
• Mar 1, 2027 — GOTS 8.0 fully mandatory
• Dec 31, 2027 — End of GRS/RCS renewals
• ~2028–2029 (indicative) — Realistic DPP obligation for textiles