Printing and Publishing
In association with Infoprint Solutions Company
Innovations in offset and flexography consumables PDF Print E-mail
Written by Régis Hourdouillie, MacDermid Printing Solutions   

The past five years have been very tough for European printers. Because of difficult economic conditions, the market growth has been very low, especially in Western Europe where there is still printing over-capacity. Even in 2005, printing production in volume was flat for major Western Europe countries, with the exception of Spain.

This had a direct impact on the printing consumables industry. As end users have been constantly pushing for lower prices, the consumables market has been shrinking in value of a few per cent per year over the last five years. Also as raw materials cost has been increasing (particularly for product based on petrol), consumables manufacturers experienced a lot of pressure on their margins in 2005.

The economic forecast is better for the years to come, especially in the packaging segment. However the growth in value should remain moderate, particularly in the offset printing segment. In Europe, most of the growth will come from Eastern countries, which means that for countries like the UK, Germany, France or Italy, the consumables market in volume should remain flat at best.

For printing consumables companies, sustainable growth can be achieved by:

  • “Playing the game better” – it is essential to work constantly on cost reduction and on quality upgrade of existing products;
  • “Playing the game differently” – although cost reduction and quality upgrade are necessary conditions to success, only innovation can drive market growth. The objective of innovation in printing consumables is to anticipate and meet market trends in the printing industry, in particular the need for higher productivity, enhanced flexibility, increased use of colours, better respect for the environment etc.

Focusing most of the effort on R&D despite adverse economic conditions is key for a company to differentiate from competition, whatever printing markets are concerned. Let’s now have a look at some recent innovations from consumables manufacturers in the offset and flexography segments.

Offset blankets – the future is polymer!


Since the mid 1990s, printers have done their best to combine efficiently these four parameters: quality, flexibility, productivity and environment.

Quality


Printers process more and more four-colour jobs. They also adapt to different qualities of paper. Take a look at the evolution of newspapers over the past years from this point of view.

By doing so, printers and publishers intend to address customers’ changing needs and also differentiate from their competitors.

The very fast growth of in-line coaters, CTP devices, along with even more sophisticated screening processes (Stochastic, Diamond etc.) points out the emerging need to reach better print quality.

  

Flexibility


As an answer to the emerging need to personalise newspapers and magazines, runs get shorter and shorter. As a response to this trend, offset presses manufacturers have worked to reach shorter make-ready times.

Productivity


No one can have missed the striking development of offset printing presses over the last 15 years. Manufacturers have profusely automated their equipment, and built faster and faster machines.

Environment


No matter how worthwhile it is for them, printers are under strong pressure from the European Community to get rid off their polluting habits and move towards environmentally-friendly processes (regarding IPA, waste, VOC etc.).

All together, these four criteria had and will obviously continue to have a strong influence on printers’ behaviours and priorities. Better quality, flexibility and productivity are the key competitive parameters that will define a printer’s success on the market. And compliance to environment regulations will become increasingly important.

From this perspective, printing blankets play a particularly important role. The new blankets should bring better print quality (better ink transfer on different paper qualities) and flexibility (printing on partial width for instance) while coping with press productivity (increasing speed).

High-tech polymers allow the manufacture of very resistant blankets. The longevity of blankets improves: this leads to less blanket changes and so better productivity. The first tests have also shown unmatched quality outputs. Needless to say, reducing the overall waste of blankets is already a fairly good step toward ‘green printing’. But there are even more benefits to the environment, as this new generation of blankets will be anufactured totally Toluene-free.

Photopolymer plates – the future is thermal!


Looking at the past year, it is apparent that there have been very few spectacular developments in flexo printing recently. The manufacturers have worked on small but sometimes substantial improvements in existing technology.

It is clear that sleeves for printing formes and anilox rollers are now completely integrated into the everyday flexographic practice. The systems have been improved further and can be considered as completely compatible with other printing processes.

The same can be said with continuous printing formes from the various suppliers, either at the ‘normal’ thickness or with ‘thin plate’ technology. The laser is a very useful instrument for the imaging of the printing form. This has been the result of many years of gradual improvement.

Mainly for flexible packaging, the new machines are now gearless with several robotic and automated functions. When asking buyers about the motivation for buying this machinery, it transpired that they wanted to have certain advantages in their production output: at least a certain lead time for producing packaging and a better quality at a higher speed. Reading between the lines, for most companies this is the final solution for better margins, although their fixed machine costs are of course higher if they leave this out of the calculations, speculating on the lower maintenance costs compared with old machinery, realising that this is only an answer for a short period of time.

Generally speaking, the total market for flexographic printed products, mainly packaging, has increased by approximately 1.5 per cent during the past year. It is very hard to find out where this increase is coming from but label and tag printing is still growing, although not as fast and spectacularly as before, while paper packaging in bags, wrapping and luxury paper and other paper products has decreased. In Europe, it’s important to note that the market has truly become digital, whereas an important amount of analogue plates is still being sold in the US.

In flexographic printing, a major innovation revolves around thermal plate processing technology. Indeed, during the past year, it has become increasingly clear that printing with solvent-based inks must now slowly be coming to an end. Many companies have invested in a kind of solvent recovery installation or a solvent burning device, forced by the environmental laws and legislations that are now becoming more effective in many countries.

Several companies have moved forward this way, for instance by using a system that incorporates the benefits of thermal processing and uses a specially developed photopolymer plate material that can be processed in thermal or conventional solvent-type processing systems.

The results for printers are outstanding: enhanced workflow, maximisation of floor area due to reduced equipment, footprint and solvent-free processing. Such a technology provides improved productivity because press-ready plates are created in less than one hour and the equipment is designed for specific market applications. Printers can expect to achieve significant reductions in dot gain on press, with minimal tonal correction required in the screening process.

 
 
< Prev   Next >
[ Back ]