How digital is the future?

A number of printers are now integrating the digital process as a complementary production technique to maximise added value services. Brands competing to capture consumer attention has resulted in shorter press runs. By harnessing digital and offset printing to work side by side, printers can quickly decide which process will be the most cost effective.

For the label and packaging printer, however, moving from conventional to digital is not without its problems. By the very nature of the product, packaging print is extremely colour critical. Moreover, to succeed in this demanding market, digital has to bring cost benefits in handling shorter press runs. It must also have the technical capability to meet the colour challenges both from an output engine and digital front end point of view.

In the last decade, the print quality of digital output engines has improved vastly. But when it comes to the digital front end, things have been less straightforward. With around 75 per cent of all label and packaging jobs being re-runs, it is understandable that printers are nervous about moving out of their comfort zone of colour references and guaranteed spot colours.

There is one major difference between the adoption of digital printing in commercial applications compared with packaging and converting. Commercial printers had a somehow more gentle transition to digital workflows. The intermediate stage of computer-to-plate adoption forced the vast majority to invest in prepress knowledge and skills. This has not happened in the converting market. Now that digital is knocking on their door, converters are faced with a challenge that so far has solely been dealt with by their repro suppliers – the challenge of colour management.

To guarantee brand protection, conventional packaging has traditionally used spot colours. In a market where spot colour is king, digital has to consistently simulate the majority of conventionally printed colours with high accuracy and repeatability in order to captue a decent market share. It has to achieve this in a way that can be easily adopted by converters with little or no prepress knowledge, without many trials or long job set-ups.

Since it is mostly uneconomical to use spot colour inks with the digital process, converters are unsure whether it can simulate a given spot colour and if so, how much time and money will be required. As a result, many jobs that could be digital remain conventional.

EskoArtwork’s answer is Kaleidoscope, an integrated colour system in every module of its Software Suite 7, that offers converters fully automatic colour conversions from conventional to digital.

Using Kaleidoscope, converters can spectrally profile solids as well as halftone process and spot colours. Once colours are digitised and entered into the database, they can be reproduced consistently, it is claimed. The database also defines which colours cannot be reached by the output engine. For colours on the edge or just outside the gamut, a label converter can fine tune and lock a colour on the database with just one iteration, according to Geert De Proost, director - Digital Converting Software Product Group, EskoArtwork.

“Kaleidoscope goes further to accommodate the need for different versions of the same colour,” he explains. “For example, when different inks are used in the conventional process, it can simulate the variations of a flexo press by integrating the dot gain compensation and the colour engine. As colour conversion is automatic, converters can postpone the decision between digital and conventional to the last minute, maximising flexibility and job profitability.”

EskoArtwork implements the colour database at the customer site as part of the installation process, reducing the need for highly skilled prepress personnel. For example, Eshuis, in The Netherlands, has seen its prepress department shift from four people looking after one HP Indigo press to three looking after four presses within the space of a year.

Hans Poortinga, product specialist at Eshuis, explains: “With two offset, three flexo and two Indigo presses, workflow was a real bottleneck. This led us to invest in EskoArtwork BackStage. Within three months we managed to fine tune the workflow process and now we have four Indigo presses running on two shifts with just one operator. BackStage allows us to work from a single file and we can make the decision about plate output as late as is possible.”

Based on an interview with Geert De Proost, director - Digital Converting Software Product Group, EskoArtwork