Two “industry heroes” invited to a special event in Moscow on November 28, 2019: Esko, leading provider of software and hardware solutions for packaging printing, and DuPont, market leader in technologies and raw materials for packaging. The motto: New standards for quality and efficiency in the flexo printing plate-production of global partners. Our General Director Vladimir Amlinskij from Flexicon Moscow was the special guest and gave a lecture to 130 interested participants. His topic: Flexicon – the functions of central prepress for flexo printing.
The trend is towards central prepress
As explained by Vladimir Amlinskij, the concept of central prepress, in which only one company is responsible for reproduction, will be a focus topic for many packaging manufacturers in the future. They face the challenge of ensuring the uniformity of their products across different countries on different types of materials and with different printing methods. The prerequisite for this: Each supplier needs individual and ready-to-print reprodata based on individual technical parameters. Amlinskij went on to explain what a global prepress partnership with Flexicon looks like and which benefits will be expectable in terms of efficiency, process and cost optimization as well as perfectly uniform print results.
New technology standards as a basis
Flexicon relies on the innovative technologies from Esko and DuPont for two simple reasons: It is the tried and tested way to make further developments in the production of flexo printing plates and a guarantor for achieving new quality standards. Esko and DuPont presented the results of a joint test project at the technical event in Moscow. They showed test prints that were produced using the new, recently introduced technologies compared to conventional technologies. In both cases, the motifs were flawless. Nevertheless, the new equipment obviously offers certain advantages. Flexicon Moscow was involved in the preparation of the test prints as an independent artwork and repro house.
Innovations in the production of flexo printing plates
The convincing argument for producing flexo printing plates on Esko Crystal XPS devices with LED exposure technology is the high and stable quality. The LED exposure system can be switched on immediately. The exposed plate will not be heated up, therefore cooling down the surface is not required. The stability of the radiation over a longer period is different compared to conventional exposure systems. Unlike lamps which must be changed regularly every 500-1,000 hours, diodes offer more than 5,000 hours of performance. In addition to the equipment, the software to produce flexo printing forms plays an important role as well. The Print Control Wizard software for selecting and generating crystal grids has one major advantage: reduced contamination of the form during printing. This results in fewer interruptions during the print run. Over the course of the event, the new generation of DuPont Cyrel EASY photopolymer plates was also presented. Additionally, the differences between the DuPont Cyrel FAST 2000 TD development processor and the previous model were explained. As an example, a rigid fixation of the plate eliminated problems with the instability of different printing form sizes. The participants also learned which advantages thermal technology offers over solvents: improved speed, lower power consumption and a more compact design.
The event raised awareness for the future challenges of packaging printing and showed concrete solutions. One of them is Flexicon as a global and central interface between packaging manufacturers and packaging printing companies.
