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Flexo that rivals gravure?
May 4, 2008
I visited Williamson Printing in Dallas last week during the FTA's Info*Flex and got a tour of the 124-year-old, family-owned printer's operations from prepress to the pressroom. The largely commercial printer is breaking new ground in flexography with a full line of Kodak Flexcel digital-flexo prepress systems and its Heidelberg Speedmaster CD 102 sheetfed-offset press.
First off, a Kodak Trendsetter NX 830 imagesetter readies the thermal-imaging "film" in less than 7 mins, from loading to unloading, via SquareSpot technology. The finished image layer in a new 32 x 42 in. size, is then united to a .045 Flexcel NXH digital-flexo plate with a Flexcel NX Mid Laminator. That process takes less than 2 mins, is so fast as to allow no dust to reach the plate and is so secure that it totally seals out oxygen during exposure, Kodak says. The result is stable, flat-topped dots as small as 10 microns versus analog's and digital laser-ablative mask technology's minimum dots of 20-30 microns. After plate washing, Williamson uses a new Mekrom system to dry the plates in only 30 mins. The whole setup is one of only seven beta sites in the world--four in the US and three in Europe.
To demonstrate the digital-flexo's quality as comparable to offset (and rivalling gravure?), the printer is turning out thousands of posters for the new Disney "Chronicles of Narnia" movie, Prince Caspian. During the tour, the 16-station press ran the four-color-process flexo job in "direct flexo plate on print blanket cylinder" mode at 7,000 sph. Harper anilox rolls and Zeller+Gmelin UV inks were used on the 300-lpi printing. Williamson also chose flexo for the posters because it wanted to chase high print densities--all of which were above 2.0.
"The print quality that we're seeing so far from our Flexcel NX system is impressive," says Jesse Williamson, company president. "The results we're getting on press have exceeded our expectations."
I certainly agree with Jess Williamson. Even with a loupe, you'd be hard-pressed to say you think the poster is not offset, it's that good.
Your next chance to see all the Flexcel NX plate-production systems in action is at drupa later this month.
Posted by Mark Spaulding on May 4, 2008 | Comments (0)