The Xanté Excelagraphix 4200P is being used for short run corrugated print
As digital carton presses start to be installed in significant numbers, the packaging market will now be able to assess what to do with them. Digital Printer assesses their progress.
In the past few months HP has started shipping significant numbers of its Indigo 30000, making it the first digital carton press to ship in more than ones and twos. There are now about ten up and running worldwide, with double this number anticipated by the end of the year.
The significance of this is that with a sensible number of digital carton presses out in the real world, the packaging sector can start to assess what to do with them. Previously we have only seen digital carton printing done within the limitations of SRA3 format presses, or on a handful of early B2 inkjets and Xeikon 500 mm 3500 web toner presses.
For instance, the only Screen Truepress JetSX B2 inkjet press in the UK is being used for on-demand work on pre-cut cartonboard by RCS in Retford, which we wrote about in Digital Printer May 2014. RCS was in the news recently for less welcome reasons as it entered a Company Voluntary Arrangement with its creditors in August, but the Screen press is still running there. Europe’s only other Truepress JetSX is at Vögeli in Switzerland, which is also offering on-demand work on pre-cut cartonboard.
However, by the beginning of August there were nine Indigo 30000 presses up and running in carton plants, according to Simon Lewis, director of strategic marketing for HP Indigo. These are at Heret Printing (an Israeli packaging firm that was the first to get a 30000, in September 2013): Nosco (USA); ASG (Canada); MPS (USA); Flach (Netherlands); and Pfaffle (Germany). It seems that the three North American users have two presses each. A tenth machine is about to go to Taiwan. There are no UK orders yet, although Mr Lewis said that a so-far-unnamed UK company has signed a letter of intent.
‘All users so far are existing folding carton companies,’ said Mr Lewis. ‘A couple of users already have smaller Indigo presses, but the majority are new to digital. We assumed that the early adopters would be mid-sized independents, but the two US users are very big. For example, Nosco has a large digital labels operation and has an Indigo WS6600 already in a large new operation outside Philadelphia.’
Format freedom
Why the sudden stress on cartons? It is mainly to do with size. For the first couple of decades of digital production presses, the imaging technology confined nearly all of them to variations on SRA3 formats. As cartons take up a lot of room when opened flat, SRA3 is only big enough for small boxes, typically cosmetics, pharmaceuticals and novelty gift items. Unless the boxes are really small, you can only print them one-up, while the carton converting sector is used to printing multiples on B2 and B1 presses. A B2 digital press starts to look credible for cartons, while B1 matches many carton offset presses with the advantage that you can use the same finishing kit for both.
Early toner presses also tended to have relatively tight curves in their paper paths, which put a limit on the thickness and stiffness of board that you could pass through them. Although they have improved over the years, 350 gsm is the maximum for most toner presses, which is on the thin side for cartonboard.
The advent of inkjet and new liquid toner technologies has broken the size barrier. Inkjet is a true non-contact process and it is easy to arrange the print heads above a flat transport path that can take items of any thickness. The heads can be staggered or butted together to make single-pass print bars of any width, limited only by the cost of making them.
However, inkjet carton presses have yet to enter the market in any numbers. Screen has two of its Truepress JetSX presses in Europe, while Fujifilm’s Jet Press F, announced at Ipex, is now said to be due for ‘commercialisation’ in 2015. MGI, which showed a prototype B2 inkjet called Alphajet at drupa 2012, now seems to have put this on hold. Konica Minolta says that its KM-1 sheet fed B2 inkjet press will be suitable for carton work, but is not expecting any installations until 2015.
Xanté, on the other hand, has shipped about 50 of its Excelagraphix 4200P printers. This is a hand-fed 1066 mm wide flatbed inkjet based on Memjet print heads that costs £60,000, but this is primarily used for corrugated box and display work rather than folding cartons.
Liquid toner
HP has finally managed to get its liquid toner process up to the 750 mm width needed for B2 formats. It actually showed a prototype B2 press at drupa 2000, but that one was abandoned as a dead end so the eventual ‘wide format’ family at drupa 2014 had started with a fresh design.
The 30000 is a simplex model with heavy duty feed for cartonboard up to 600 microns, with a ‘one-shot’ imaging process where all the colours (up to seven) are built up on the same plate cylinder and transferred via the blanket to the substrate in one pass. The 10000 general commercial duplex press which started deliveries in 2012 uses the multi-shot method, where the more flexible paper is passed repeatedly around the impression cylinder with one colour transferred per rotation. With either method, the more colours you print the lower the throughput, but this is balanced by the fact that Indigos are the only digital presses with the facility to run custom-mixed ink colours.
HP first showed the Indigo 30000 at drupa 2012
Mr Lewis says that some Indigo 10000 press users are also trying out carton work, but the process limits the maximum board thickness to 450 microns (or 400 gsm).
Canon’s alternative
While it took Indigo almost 20 years to get a B2 liquid toner press into the market, Canon jumped straight in with a B1-equivalent liquid toner press that it calls InfiniStream. This is being built at its Océ factory in Poing, near Munich, which has been developing the process for more than ten years.
So far it only has one commercial user, the packaging printer Joh Leupold in Schwabach, Germany. There is another InfiniStream running in Canon’s demo centre in Poing. Roland Stasiczek, Canon’s director of marketing for InfiniStream technology, says that series production and installations will start in 2015.
Leupold received its InfiniStream as a four-colour line about a year ago. This was upgraded in May, taking it up to seven colour print units plus a TRESU webCoat inline varnishing unit and a heavy duty bielomatik CFS di72 digital-controlled cutter, including a piler with non-stop palletising. The production line can now produce any sheet size between B2 and B1 and up to 1060 mm length.
The Canon liquid ink process is significantly different from Indigo’s. Most obviously, it is a web fed press with a width of 1110 mm, which means that you have to use large cores for cartonboard so it is not curved too tightly. It can take up to 600 micron board, which covers the majority of carton needs.
The liquid ink is completely new, explained Mr Stasiczek. ‘Ours is an electrophotographic process that uses a new liquid toner. It is in some ways similar to the Indigo process, but the big difference is that we do not build up multiple colours on the blanket and we do not pre-charge the toner.’ A consequence of this is that the ink remains liquid on the substrate and the press is fitted with a substantial and lengthy hot air/IR web dryer to evaporate the volatile oil.
The use of one print unit per colour helps the InfiniStream to print at least four times as fast as the Indigo 30000, at 120 metres per minute for any number of colours, equivalent to 14,400 B2 sheets or 7200 B1 sheets per hour. The Indigo, with its single print unit and multiple rotations per colour, prints up to 3450 B2 sheets per hour with CMYK and slows down for every extra colour.
It seems likely that the multi-unit InfiniStream will cost substantially more than the £1.5 million or so of the Indigo 30000, but Mr Stasiczek is confident that the cost per copy will make it competitive against offset for runs up to 3000 to 4000 B1 sheets: ‘Our prediction is still valid and has been proven in real production so far. It goes without saying that the colour coverage per job influences the break-even in digital printing. However, on average we are within our target range.’
Waiting for Landa
The Landa S10 is another B1 format dedicated carton press, with between four and eight colours and the ability to print at up to 6500 sheets per hour on standard cartonboard, with no special pre-coating. This will be the first of the new family of presses from Landa that was announced and previewed at drupa 2012. Originally the company rather optimistically predicted that its beta test programme would start in 2013. A year ago, a redesign was revealed and the beta programme was put back to late 2014, but the latest is that this will now be next year.
This is not all that surprising, as Nanography is a completely new process (it is essentially offset inkjet, as explained in more detail in Digital Printer July 2014) and at drupa the company admitted that it had a lot of development work still to do, especially on the image quality.
According to Gilad Tzori, vice president for product strategy Landa is ‘making significant progress’ towards beta shipments, after a number of beta candidates visited Landa over the last few months. ‘In addition to conducting business meetings, we demonstrated the Landa cockpit and they saw beta presses in various stages of assembly and testing. They were very impressed with what they saw and thought that our progress was impressive.’
Cost conundrum
As covered in previous issues of Digital Printer, the company has been predicting that Nanography will have the lowest cost per copy of any digital process, which will allow it to compete with offset and other conventional processes for significantly longer runs than previous digital presses.
This was rather derailed over the summer when company founder Benny Landa was interviewed by the Israeli business magazine Globes. He seemed to indicate an ink cost of $25 million for a Nanographic press over a period of five years. This is about £3 million per year, a startling cost for a process that (in S10 configuration) can only print 6500 B1 sheets per hour, a third of the speed of a decent offset press.
At the same time, Kodak announced that the cost per A4 page of its new Prosper 6000 inkjet web press, running at either 200 or 300 metres per minute, would be $0.005 (about 0.3p).
So we asked Landa how its figures stack up. According to Mr Tzori: ‘It is important to point out that Globes is a business magazine and not a print industry magazine – so they can’t be expected to get all the jargon straight. In the Globes interview, Benny Landa said that a $3 million Landa press will be able to generate annuity revenue (consumables, service and spare parts – referred to as ‘ink revenue’) of up to $25 million over five years. He was of course referring to the maximally-utilised presses running 24/7. This certainly isn’t our expectation from a typical installation.
‘One must be careful when comparing the Landa press to the Kodak Prosper or any other high-speed web inkjet press. It’s not apples to apples. Inkjet presses typically print low quality, low value pages and are limited to very low area coverage – such as books and transpromo jobs – whereas the Landa presses are designed for high-quality applications with higher value pages that will typically be of much higher area coverage, required for commercial printing, packaging and publishing.
‘We stick with our claim of having the lowest digital printing cost per page in the industry – but you have to compare apples to apples. That means that you have to make comparisons in the high quality, high area coverage markets in which we play: commercial printing, packaging and magazine-quality publishing. No one will purchase a Landa press to do low quality direct mail pieces, just as no one will purchase a Kodak Prosper for high quality graphic arts. Similarly, you can’t compare the page cost of a 7% area coverage book with a 140% area coverage packaging job. When comparing the same pages, Landa has the lowest cost in the industry.’
