From all-digital prepress and gearless servo drives to competitive print quality and in-line finishing capabilities, flexo has certainly come a long way. Converting gathered comments by some of North America's top flexo printers to gauge the state of the industry and get a glimpse of what the future may hold.

"We're transferring everything over to digital flexo," says Doug Beauchamp, controller for Cascades Boxboard Group (Cobourg, Ontario, Canada), a converter of flexo-printed folding cartons.

Charlotte, NC-based J.R. Cole Industries, Inc., is of the same mind. It's doing more work at 150-lpi in UV-flexo with its Esko CDI Spark digital imager and Dupont Cyrel® FAST platemaker. "With CTP flexo, you almost don't need offset printing anymore for most applications," says Joe Richards, vice president of sales.

Cascades Cobourg plant manager Eric News adds the importance of high-tech aniloxes. "We use up to 1,000-line-screen anilox rolls; we even have some 1,200-line-screen. Our operators have some leeway in changing aniloxes to achieve what level of quality they're shooting for."

For many flexo printers, today's press mechanics mean that gears will be relegated to museums very soon. "Servo drives are a lot more accurate than gears, and there's a lot less wear and tear on the press," says Rod Ali, sales manager for Flex Pack USA, Inc. (Orlando, FL). "You're a lot more versatile when you have the servo drives." Flex Pack runs an 8-color gearless Novoflex® press from Windmoeller & Hoelscher Corp.

Milwaukee-based Fredman Bag president Tim Fredman agrees. His company operates an 8-color Uteco Emerald gearless press. "The equipment's getting better, the processes are getting better, the materials are getting better. It's allowing flexo to take a bite out of the other industries."

Labelmakers aren't left out, either. J.R. Cole's vice president of manufacturing Larry Long comments, "Back at the last Labelexpo Americas, all the pressmakers were showing servo-driven presses. The process today is UV-flexo; letterpress is fast going away."

Line screens of 133 may have been yesterday's gold standard; tomorrow's just may be 200. With its 10-color gearless Infiniti press from PCMC, "we've printed 157-line-screens in fingerprint trials successfully," says Custom Poly Bag (Alliance, OH) president Doug Prather.

"We're pushing flexo as much as we can, although we're still doing R&D and manage over 200-line-screens on our process jobs," adds Gary Cane, general manager for Paragon Label (Petaluma, CA). "But in the label markets with flexo, we're pushing down the conventional offset houses."

Danny Juraic, graphics and technical service manager at Cascades Cobourg, touts flexo's supremacy. "The all-digital workflow has made a huge impact to where offset is losing around 10 percent market share a year to flexo because we can meet the quality as good and, in my opinion, better than litho."

Paragon Label president Jason Grossman sums up the dynamics. "We're doing both advances in flexo prepress and printing. The inks are changing, UV inks, water-based inks, different substrates. We definitely have changes happening in all directions. It's pretty exciting."