This being a drupa year we’re expecting all sorts of new technologies to be presented in Düsseldorf in May. And not to be outdone, Fespa in Amsterdam is the site of a bevy of new technologies this month. Ricoh will introduce a new flatbed roll-to-roll printer and there will be many more new products to explore. There is certainly no lack of innovation, but we aren’t seeing enough being done when it comes to sustainability developments.

The problem isn’t so much with commercial print waste, since most of this is still paper based. Paper recycling is well-established in developed economies and although the paper industry is slacking when it comes to digital print deinking and recycling investments, the model is at least there. At some point the necessary upgrades will be made.

Press technologies are also readily recycled and here too a model is in place. Ricoh, Canon, HP and Xerox have long since reused skins and other components from devices they have reclaimed for reuse. And printing presses have very long lifespans, assuming parts and consumables are still available. But more seriously we have new inks and substrates that cannot always be easily parted. This compromises paper recycling and will undermine the considerable advances made in the industry’s environmental sustainability in the last few years. That said, in the commercial print sector we have an established foundation and supply chains for improved sustainability. The same cannot truly be said for the packaging sector where innovation, particularly in materials science may be spurring more problems than it solves.

In the last few years we have seen some gorgeous innovations in shapes and sizes of packaging, thanks to innovation in substrates, inks and packaging systems. There has been a trend towards smaller packages and multipacks, packages within packages which suits the market but drives excess packaging consumption. This inevitably generates waste, much of which gets burned rather than being put into established recycling streams.

According to data from the European Union (EU), each European generated an average of over 188kg of packaging waste, ranging from 73.8kg per person in Croatia to more than 246kg per person in Ireland. The EU’s goal is to recycle 70% of packaging waste by 2030, from all sources but perhaps we shouldn’t be generating so much of it in the first place. That is much easier said than done, but as with judicious use of print which is now a commonplace, we can all think more carefully about the packaging waste we generate. 

Laurel Brunner

This article was produced by the Verdigris Project, an industry initiative intended to raise awareness of print’s positive environmental impact. This weekly commentary helps printing companies keep up to date with environmental standards, and how environmentally friendly business management can help improve their bottom lines. Verdigris is supported by the following companies: Agfa Graphics, EFI, Fespa, Fujifilm, HP, Kodak, Miraclon, Ricoh, Unity Publishing and Xeikon.

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The LXa5 is said to offer photorealistic printing with Konica Minolta 6pl printheads delivering high resolution and variable dot capabilities. It prints with speeds up to 37sqm/hr and has a maximum resolution of 1440 x 726 dpi and can take media up to 100mm thick. It also has pneumatic pin registration designed for fast and accurate media placement and an anti-crash system to protect print heads.

Joey Kim, managing director at InkTec, said, ‘With Fespa’s theme being Opportunities Revealed, the exhibition is the ideal event to have the European launch of the Jetrix LXa5 printer. Positioned to appeal to those that are seeking to extend their wide format print offering or to potentially enter the sector for the first time, the printer totally reflects the overall sentiment of Fespa this year.’

InkTec’s stand will additionally be showcasing DTF and UV-DTF printing. The DTF solutions range will feature DTF printers, oven/shaker, film, inks and powder, while the UV-DTF solutions will aim to show produce designs that can be easily transfer directly onto hard, smooth objects and even irregular shapes.

Also shown at the exhibition will be the Jetrix XGR320, a 3.2m UV LED roll-to-roll printer with Ricoh Gen6 printheads.

InkTec will be showcasing its products at Fespa in Hall 1, Stand C72.

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The new high speed inserting lines, each capable of completing 30,000 packs per hour, will be located at APS Group’s Preston Brook, Cheshire and Cheadle, Stockport print and mail centres. They follow the installation in 2022 of two similar Fusion Speed lines.

Founded in 1961, APS employs over 900 staff globally with headquarters in Cheadle and a number of regional offices across the UK, Europe and North America. The business serves brands with creative and content, customer communications, and customer experience services and operates several Ricoh Pro VC60000 web-fed inkjet digital presses.

The investment builds on a 20-year relationship between APS and Böwe, with the latest Fusion Speed technology delivering ‘predictable high-speed throughput’, supported on-site by Bowe performance support personnel. The Bowe support team is aligned with APS’s production management to optimise production throughput and maximise equipment uptime.

Steve Goodall, group operations director at APS commented, ‘Our state-of-the-art facilities located at Preston Brook and Cheadle have been purposefully designed for maximum efficiency, ensuring that our clients receive the best possible service. We are thrilled about the capabilities of our latest technology investment, as it will further enhance our clients’ confidence in us to provide them with secure, efficient and reliable services, especially in times of difficulty.’

Steve Basnett, Böwe senior UK account manager added. ‘Simply put, the numbers speak for themselves. When it comes delivering consistent high-speed mailing output the Fusion Speed Inserter is unrivalled and APS Group are leveraging this latest advanced technology to efficiently meet the SLAs [service level agreements] of their clients’

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Yoursurprise has been working in exclusive partnerships with well-known brand owners for personalised packaging, where the demand for print quality is rising. The 18 year-old business has relationships with brands in luxury food and drink from chocolate to whisky and the quality of samples from the Pro Z75’s beta installation at Heeter in the US was key to the purchase decision.

Production manager Bartjan Van Damme explained, ‘Colour quality and consistency are very important to our partners. And this is where the Ricoh Pro Z75 really excels – even though we do not have professional print operators running the press. That says a lot about the high level of automation of this machine, and its user friendliness.

‘We have really been eagerly anticipating the arrival of the Pro Z75. Its ability to handle B2+ (585 x 750mm) sized substrates allows us to further innovate and accelerate growth.’

Nico Veenendaal, director of business & gifts development, said that the B2+ format allows the development and addition of completely new products. He added, ‘Its speed of 4500sph ensures high production capacity, making it easy to manage peak moments. This opens a whole new chapter for us.’

Mr. Veenendaal further noted, ‘Ricoh has been listening very carefully to the market demands and needs before developing this B2 inkjet press to enable innovative businesses like Yoursurprise to keep pushing the limits and prosper,’ and confirmed taht the investment cements the business ethos at Yoursurprise: ‘Sales, process automation and print production – all add up to a highly successful business model.’

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The 60-plus year-old business specialises in high quality litho, personalised digital print and mailing. It runs two five-colour Heidelberg presses, and two Ricoh Pro C9210 digital colour presses.

Production manager Tony Clark explained, ‘We reviewed how much we were spending on perfect binding and believed, with the right machinery, we could keep a large percentage of it in house, drastically reducing the turnaround times and save on transportation costs. There was also the potential to win more business as we would be more competitive and quicker.

‘We already had a Horizon SPF-200L bookletmaker which has proven to be a great investment, speeding up production and completing a larger variety of finished book sizes. It is well built and reliable. We tested the BQ-270 at the IFS showroom and then visited the Horizon factory in Germany. I was able to network and meet other printers who had experience of using the BQ-270 and the feedback was largely positive. We also researched what else was on the market. We believed for our budget and requirements the BQ-270 was the best system available.’

Mr Clark said that he and his colleagues have been ‘extremely impressed’ with how easy the machine is to operate and the quality of product it can produce, and also praised the relationship with IFS.

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Eef de Ridder, vice president, Graphic Communications Group, Ricoh Europe, explains, ‘We have been listening to our clients. Following the positive feedback and orders of Ricoh’s UV flatbed series, and the continuing market demand for flexible UV hybrid devices for sign and graphics applications, we wanted to explore how Ricoh technology could be combined with Flora’s manufacturing expertise to create responsive, versatile solutions that meets today’s market demands. We look forward to expanding our offering with systems that combine both parties’ technical knowledge and expertise to support clients as they evolve their large format capabilities.’

Work is currently underway on the first new printer to be developed under the new agreement. This is a compact flatbed hybrid printer that will use Ricoh printheads, ColorGate Rip software and ICC profiles. The new printer will be able to run rigid and flexible media up to 2m wide on substrates ranging from PVC banners to vinyl and rigid boards, using linear motor technology for accuracy and productivity. Support for the printer will be provided by Ricoh’s EMEA sales and service network.

New systems developed jointly by Ricoh and Flora will join Ricoh’s existing portfolio that includes the Pro T7210 and  Pro TF6251 UV flatbed printers, and Pro L5160e and Pro L5130e roll-fed latex printers.

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The Borough’s Document Centre and Mailroom employs 14 full time staff and runns two Ricoh colour digital presses, several Kyocera MFDs, an HP large format plotter, a Polar guillotine, a Stahl folder, a Citoborma drill and an FSN numbering machine. Its relationship with KAS dates back to 1990, when bought two inserters, when the Community Charge (better remembered as the Poll Tax) was introduced.

Subsequent outsourcing of what became the Council Tax resulted in the replacement of the two original KAS machines in 2001 with a DL to C5 Mailmaster 565. Simon Hime, manager of the Document Centre and Mailroom, explains, ‘Although the Mailmaster 565 was still running well after more than 20 years, it was starting to show its age at times, and it couldn’t insert into C4 envelopes. So when KAS offered a showroom demonstration of their Mailmaster Compact, which can do C4 as well as C5 and DL, we jumped at the opportunity, bringing our own letters and envelopes to test on the machine. Following a successful demonstration, the machine was ordered and delivered in late summer this year [2023].’

Mr Hime commented that he and his team had been impressed with how quickly they were trained on the new machine and with a follow-up engineer visit. The machine’s performance has been more than satisfactory too, he said: ‘It’s been absolutely fine. As well as now being able to insert C4 envelopes, the Compact eats up, with changeovers in minutes, our multiple short-run jobs, including pre-folded A1-size planning applications, stapled sets and thicker books up to 7mm, often at up to the maximum speed of 6000 envelopes per hour.’

Possible future developments include retrofitting a KAS letter feeder with code reading to support election-related work or hybrid mailings. 

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What’s now called embellishment or special effects used to be a group of purely post-press operations. These included lamination, spot or flood varnishing and foiling (hot or cold). Other eye-catching things have always had to be done in or on the press – if you wanted metallic colours you had to use a special ink or print on a metallised substrate; the same applied for fluorescent or other special colours.

Digital print has blurred those boundaries, bringing a number of ways of achieving the same or ‘close enough’ effects, combined with the flexibility and minimal set-up requirements characteristic of digital print. These also split into in-press effects and subsequently-applied effects.

Before looking at these in detail, it’s also worth noting that a sustainability argument is emerging for digital embellishment as an alternative to more conventional processes. This comes from Scodix, which makes stand-alone ‘embellishment presses’ (distributed in the UK by Friedheim) that can apply a wide range of decorative effects to printed sheets, with full digital flexibility in each.

Scodix carried out a lifecycle assessment of its digital foiling options which found that compared to conventional hot stamp foiling, its version reduces CO2e (CO2 equivalent) by 85%, fossil fuel usage by nearly 85%, and water consumption by 80% per B1 sheet. The study, carried out by EcamRicert, and Mérieux NutriSciences Companies, compared the enhancement of a single B1 sheet through to 100,000 B1 sheets using Scodix foil (175g) versus traditional foiling methods.

That’s only one of the options that Scodix offers and there’s no indication given that any of the other supported techniques offer comparable advantages. However, like any other form of digital printing, it seems likely that overall wastage of materials and energy is likely to be lower simply through the ability to only print or finish the number required.

The main argument in favour of these types of effects though is that they add impact to printed products and therefore margin to your work. Some you can only do if you bought the right press, though they could also be a factor in choosing a new one. There’s an increasing number of toner presses that offer additional colours which may include clear ‘varnish’, white, fluorescent and metallic colours, though usually only one or sometimes two at a time.

Plus-one – or more

Machines that offer a fifth colour include Xerox’s iGen line and Ricoh’s Pro C7200, also sold by Heidelberg as the Versafire EV (and about to be replaced by the Pro C7500, though we’ve not seen any specification for this yet). Kodak’s Nexpress and Nexfinity models could do this too, with options over where in the laydown sequence the fifth colour went, though both are now discontinued. Moving up to six colours brings in the popular Xerox Iridesse, and the more recent Fujifilm Revoria, while most HP Indigos can handle up to seven colours, though of course click charges go up in proportion with all extra colour presses. Xerox also offers a conversion kit for two-pass printing on its entry-level PrimeLink C9065/C9070, which potentially allows the use of up to eight colours, albeit with a complete change of toner cartridges between passes.

The exact choice of extra colours varies by manufacturer, but in addition to white – for use on coloured or transparent substrates – and clear – used to create flood or spot varnish effects – fluorescent or ‘neon’ colours are offered, particularly pink and sometimes yellow. These can replace or be mixed with their standard CMYK equivalents to expand the colour gamut for more eye-catching effects. A few offer metallic toners too, which again can be printed solid or mixed to provide novel colours and finishes.

After the event

Post-press options are more about foiling, spot varnish and various creative lamination processes, often in combination. A good entry-level choice here is foil-over-toner, a two-pass method that uses ‘real’ foil in a laminator like Vivid’s Matrix models or those from Caslon, Foliant (sold via IFS), Komfi (from Friedheim) or Autobond. Similar options also come from GMP and Intec, now part of the Plockmatic group.

An entry-level option for foil-over-toner is Vivid’s Matrix, seen here at a trade show

In these, the initial colour print is first laminated with a clear film, then printed again with the foil pattern in black toner on top of the film, before a second pass through the laminator transfers the foil to the partially melted black toner. It’s a more labour-intensive process but it works with a very wide range of foil types and doesn’t require special consumables.

Then there are the fully ‘digital’ embellishment devices that offer spot UV and/or foiling in a single operation. This category includes devices like Duplo’s B2 DuSense 8000, which is offered in various configurations providing spot UV, digital foiling or both, including a pre-treatment option for expanding the types of print that can be handled. It’s also possible to build up textured ‘3D’ effects with multiple passes, which the smaller B3 DuSense 810 also supports. An alternative is the B3+ Konica Minolta AccurioShine 3600, which uses technology from MGI, in which Konica Minolta holds a significant stake. It too can produce ‘dimensional’ effects.

At the top end of the digital embellishment market are the ranges from Konica Minolta/MGI and Scodix. These are dedicated industrial production devices that offer UV varnish and foiling, with Scodix offering a particularly wide range of foils and finished effects, while MGI’s line goes up to B1 sheet size in the form of the print-and-embellish AlphaJet that was formally launched in October 2022. Kurz is another player at the industrial end of the scale, having bought Steinemann, whose inkjet varnish and foiling systems it was already marketing as Digital Metal. These include the sheet-fed B2 DM-Smartliner for 2D flat varnishing and foiling and the DM-Maxliner for raised and textured effects.

Whether you’re just ready to dip a toe into digital embellishment and cautious with the investment, or know that you’ve got a ready market for it but need to be sure it’s good enough and fast enough to meet your customers’ needs, there should be something to suit and help your work shine.

Preparing files for embellishment

All digital embellishment processes require ‘artwork’ to control where the effects are applied. Usually this means creating additional layers in the originating applications and/or print PDFs, though some vendors offer DFE-based tools to create embellishment guides or colour substitutions from standard PDFs on-the-fly.

Andrew Bailes-Collins of Ultimate Technographics, which makes imposition, nesting and ganging software, has written a handy guide to preparing generic PDFs that should process correctly through most embellishment vendors’ DFEs and thus avoid some of the common pitfalls that require manual reworking in the prepress studio.

Called PDF Creation for Digital Embellishment, it covers the use of spot colours, layers, knock-out and overprint and choice of correct versions of PDF for hand-off. It’s available free from Ultimate Technographics’ website.

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Described as ‘the world’s first B2 perfecting sheetfed aqueous-based inkjet press’, Ricoh says the Pro Z75 will ‘accelerate the shift from offset to digital with higher print quality, faster turnaround times and fewer demands on staff following successful in-market testing’, delivering ‘the advantages of a sheet-fed platform with the low running costs and high productivity of inkjet’. The description carefully fits around competitive B2 inkjet machines in that Konica Minolta’s KM-1e does perfect but uses UV ink, while Fujifilm’s JetPress 750S and variants has aqueous ink but doesn’t perfect.

The specification is as previously announced, with print speeds of up to 4500 sheets per hour (sph) in straight printing or 2250sph duplex/perfecting mode. Stainless steel piezo print heads give 1200dpi native resolution at all speeds with four colour (CMYK) pigment-based inks, while the proprietary drying system ‘ensures high quality results ready for immediate finishing’. The press handles uncoated, inkjet treated and offset coated media up to 400gsm with a maximum sheet size of 585mm x 750mm.

In addition, the press incorporates ‘significant’ automation solutions and an intuitive control panel to reduce the need for operator intervention and improve shift efficiency. A heavy duty ‘offset-like’ build quality of Ricoh’s own design and advanced, durable printheads are designed to maximise press uptime and availability.

US beta test site Heeter Printing has been using the Z75 since summer 2022. President Kirk Schlecker commented, ‘The Ricoh Pro Z75 is like a multitool for our operation. It combines the image quality, efficiency, print size, substrate flexibility and economics that allow us to say ‘yes’ to more jobs, and deliver a better experience for our clients.’

‘As shorter runs and increasing demand for data-driven communications push print service providers to adapt their production strategies, we are helping them lever the latest hardware, software and data to become indispensable to their clients with the Ricoh Pro Z75 as a powerful example of that commitment in action,’ said Eef de Ridder, vice president, graphic communications, Ricoh Europe. ‘The result is a new level of performance that enables easier, faster and more profitable production of applications like direct mail, postcards, marketing materials and other commercial print work.’

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The litho-based  company moved into wide-format five years ago with a Roland roll-fed solvent machine, but growing demand, including for printing onto rigid media, which meant time-consuming mounting, led director Gordon Bryan to look for a hybrid machine that could handle both kinds of work.

‘SOS offered us the Xenons machine and the Almeida cutter for less than the price of a standalone hybrid machine from their rivals – it’s literally two machines for less than the price of one,’ said Mr Bryan, adding, ‘ At first, this put me off a little – you wonder how it’s possible – but we were reassured that the Xenons uses the latest Ricoh print heads, which is the key component.  Other users gave us good reports, and the test prints we did looked great.

‘The cost may have been low, but the quality has been high. I can honestly say it has performed perfectly from day one, no matter what we have thrown at it. We’re very concerned with colour accuracy and it’s been calibrated to match the output of our other devices. The other big plus is productivity; because it’s an LED UV machine, drying is instant, and because we opted for a rolling bed on the Almeida cutter, we have automated poster cutting which saves us upwards of four hours a day and frees up our operator.

‘The cutter is very versatile, it comes with a big set of tools as standard – not as optional extras. The speed is great and the accuracy is amazing,’ Mr Bryan added.

The Xenons X180 has a maximum width of 1.88m and will print on ACP, foam, board, flute board, glass, ceramic tiles, wood, and on a wide range of vinyl and flexible media. The Almeida cutter is available in a wide range of sizes, in this case 2.5 x 1.3m.

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