Flexo Plate Digital picks Esko solutions to expand capabilities and underpin growth goals
Flexo Plate Digital’s desire to offer more plate options, competitively and with increased quality, prompted it to invest in the CDI Spark 4260 digital flexo imager and XPS Crystal 5080 exposure solution from Esko (www.esko.com).
This investment, that includes the CDI Spark 4260 digital flexo imager with Optics 80 v2, is designed to support growth at Flexo Plate Digital, the biggest flexo repro house in Southeast Asia in terms of production capacity. Located in Jakarta, Flexo Plate Digital was established 10 years ago and employs 25 people. It has also underpinned the operation’s commitment to continuous improvement by integrating plate imaging and exposure in a single process.
The CDI Spark 4260 digital flexo imager addresses the highest quality flexo applications, primarily in the flexible packaging and folding carton markets, and runs at up to 8 sqm per hour thanks to a high-reliability fiber laser with multibeam optics. Its Optics 80 productivity feature offers fully variable resolution imaging and it can image a full size 1067 x 1524 mm plate of arbitrary thickness in 12 minutes.
The XPS Crystal 5080, that supports simultaneous UV main and rear exposure, will also enable Flexo Plate Digital to better serve its client base of multinational brands and convertors. It requires 50% fewer manual operations compared to other technologies and drastically cuts the time needed to produce a print-ready plate. One of the key factors ensuring plate stability is fast UV exposure, transferring the finest lines and smallest print onto the plate. Combining the CDI and XPS automates the process, reducing it from five manual operations to just one.
In making the decision, Flexo Plate Digital reviewed the market available options against its key criteria - a solution that would deliver flexo plates with highest quality and consistency to brand owners and converters. It now uses Crystal screens to expand micro-cell and flat-top-dot offerings.
Eric Oh, Flexo Plate Digital’s CEO, comments, “Over the last few months Flexo Plate Digital has made several major investments that position the company for future growth. We wanted to introduce our premium services and products at lower cost to a new customer segment. We were also keen to offer more pricing options to keep our existing and valued customers happy.
Flexo Plate Digital also liked the high quality results achieved as well as Esko’s expertise and neutrality to all major digital flexo plate vendorsas Oh explains: “The packaging industry is still evolving and is still looking for new innovations to compete with other technologies such as offset and gravure technologies out there. In order for flexo to grow and compete with other printing technologies we need to offer a better solution and better print quality offered by other printing solutions out there and by adapting this latest technology from Esko we are able to provide a very high end print solutions without being locked into one proprietary consumable.”
He continues: “By investing in Esko’ ecosystem we are able to offer more plate solutions, plate offerings and different type of plate consumables. There are many solutions out there that are compatible with Esko. We are now able to offer stronger and more refined flexo plates that competes with our current offerings using different technology at lower cost.”