At drupa 2016, EFI has announced its biggest inkjet product development to date: the new EFI Nozomi single-pass LED technology, which can reach speeds up to 75 linear metres per minute. In addition to its speeds, the new technology gives users the benefit of a low acquisition price with significant total cost of ownership advantages.
This breakthrough innovation appears in one of the first digital inkjet presses designed from the ground up to establish new standards of productivity and innovation in corrugated packaging. The 1.8m-wide EFI Nozomi C18000 inkjet press will help corrugated manufacturers and brands access a wide colour gamut and broader design options in corrugated board work with fast turnaround times, all while maintaining low production costs.
The sheetfed, digital packaging press has run speeds up to 8,100 m² / hour and can print on boards up to 1.8m x 3m in size. Users will gain superior versatility thanks to a double-lane printing feature that enables full utilisation of the press’s speed and width and increases throughput up to 9,000 80cm x 60cm boards per hour. The press’s LED imaging capabilities provide brilliant, accurate colour imaging on just about any board substrate, including traditional Kemi, model, bleach and kraft materials.
Lower costs and high productivity in digital corrugated packaging
The press is designed to offer exceptional value, reframing digital corrugated packaging by enabling cost-effective, high-quality, direct-to-board digital printing, and by eliminating expenses and a great number of steps associated with plating, printing and lamination in traditional analogue production. EFI customers can fuel their success with a leading-edge product that captures more value, accelerating the analogue to digital transformation with one of the most effective strategies for printing premium-quality, colour corrugated board with reduced overhead and costs.
“EFI’s next generation of innovation brings to market the strongest combination of versatility, imaging quality and production speeds at a total cost of ownership that is far below similar single-pass platforms,” said Guy Gecht, EFI’s CEO. “When commercially available next year, the Nozomi C18000 press will finally give the corrugated packaging market a unique solution to establish a profitable business around on-demand, customised digital printing.”
While other inkjet technologies are often developed to address signage or document printing and then adapted to corrugated packaging uses, this new EFI LED inkjet press has been designed from the ground up specifically for a $130 billion corrugated packaging industry that has more than 200 billion square metres of printed output per year – more than 25-times greater than the estimated amount of annual signage and graphics output produced.
To create the press, EFI combined some of the best features from many of its leading-edge development operations, including precision, single-pass inkjet imaging systems from US-based EFI Jetrion digital press facilities and the company’s Cretaprint ceramic decoration printer operations in Spain; advanced LED inkjet innovations from EFI’s global ink development centres; superwide-format press technology from the company’s US-based VUTEk operations; scalable Fierydigital front end (DFE) processing and management technology from EFI’s Silicon Valley development centre; and cloud-based remote diagnostics and support advancements from the company’s Bengaluru, India, technical hub.
Users will be able to increase their productivity with digital in nearly any board application, running everything from 14-point card stock to a full range of corrugated flutes – A, B, C, D, E, F, G, N, O, AB, AC, BC, EB, EF, and triple wall – without slowing down the press. The corrugated board press prints in up to seven colours, including white, and provides high-quality output with resolutions up to 360 x 720 dots per inch with four-level grayscale imaging. An in-line primer will give customers control over dot gain and ink absorption on different types of corrugated top sheets.
A 100% in-line image quality inspection system on the press is tied to robust print optimisation technologies, including inkjet nozzle, alignment and uniformity correction for the highest possible imaging quality. The Nozomi press’s permanent head architecture eliminates the downtime associated with replacing consumable printheads.
With its 'cool cure' LED imaging capabilities, the Nozomi C18000 press will help redefine sustainability in corrugated board production, as it will allow customers to eliminate wasteful warehousing routines for analogue-printed packaging with leaner, just-in-time inventory. Plus, packaging produced with the press is fully recyclable, with printed output meeting a leading recyclability and repulpability certification standard.