While many sectors of the print industry have embraced digital technology, the label sector has been slow to really adopt digital printing in any great numbers. However, that has been changing over the past year, prompted both by market conditions and a number of new printers, reports Nessan Cleary
The market for digital label printing has been growing steadily for a number of years, as the run lengths have dropped and the digital printers have taken market share from both litho and flexo printing. The current economic climate actually seems to be stimulating the digital label printing market, as Sean Skelly, director of marketing for EFI Jetrion, notes: “With the economy the way that it is consumer product companies and label producers are very concerned about waste and cost, and so you are seeing a lot of consumers buy store brands instead of some of the more expensive consumer branded goods and because of that there’s a lot more demand for short runs.”According to Christian Menegon, business development manager for HP Indigo, there are two main advantages in using a digital label printer: “One is the ability to deal with a short run now. We don’t have any start-up costs for the plate and so on, because otherwise a printer is having to decide on how many jobs he has where the set-up time is longer than the printing time. If it’s once a month then digital is not for you but if it’s more than once a day then you should consider digital. That’s basically the key argument, and the other one is variable printing which is starting to become more popular.”
Greg Neesham, sales director for Punch Graphics which manufactures Xeikon says that the uptake of variable data has been even higher in the label market than in the general commercial market: “The reason is areas like metadata, which is in things like barcodes, and numbering. Often people want 20,000 labels, but they want them numbered 1 to 20,000, or with a barcode, and you can implement that with our front end, so if you haven’t got variable numbering coming over with the artwork you can introduce that at the point of ripping on our system.”
However Marc Tinkler, senior business manager for Epson, says that variable data doesn’t seem to be so big at the moment: “People talk about variable data but in a lot of the research that we’ve done and the people that we’ve visited it doesn’t seem to be a big factor yet. I have a feeling that it will become more important in the future either because it’s there for security reasons, tracking and tracing, things like that, or for serialisation or for real variable content, like changing recipes on a label on the fly so that all the various things on a shelf are different and you don’t have to mix and match the labels with the fillings, they are just automatically mixed up on the roll.”
Inkjet
Up until now the market for digital label printing has been dominated by Xeikon and HP, both of which had machines capable of run lengths up to around 2000 linear metres. Last year Xeikon introduced the 3300 label press which can easily handle run lengths up to 4000 linear metres. It has a much higher resolution than the older 330 printer at 1200 x 3600 dpi and can print at 20 metres per minute. It has standard CMYK colours, plus a fifth unit for a spot colour or varnish, and handles substrates from 40 to 350gsm.
Not to be outdone, HP is just starting to ship its latest machine, the Indigo ws6000, which doubles the capacity of its existing ws4500 to also be able to handle run lengths of 4000 metres cost-effectively. This can run at 30 metres per minute in four colour mode, or faster with less colours because of the way that the Indigo printers lay down their colours one at a time. This has room for seven colours and a resolution of 1200 dpi.
The ability to handle these sorts of run lengths is important as Menegon explains: “Probably 75 per cent of the jobs are below the 4000 figure. It’s a huge market, but this doesn’t mean that all of them will be or can be done digitally, essentially because of some technicalities because you may have some special effect that only a screen ink or a flexo ink can do that digital will not be able to address.”
Xeikon is using dry toner and HP is using Indigo’s Electro-ink, but a number of other companies have also started to introduce label printers using inkjet technology. Menegon says: “Inkjet will be able to do things that our inks will not be able to do. For instance, with inkjet you can have any type of pigment that you want so you can make one which is resistant for outdoor applications, or one which is heat resistant, because it’s easier to put a pigment into an inkjet technology than it is to either dry toner or liquid electro-ink. So you have a wider choice pigment-wise in inkjet, but on the other hand in order to print a web of 30cm wide you need a few thousand nozzles each of which can be blocked because of a particle that is a bit bigger than the others in the ink, so there are pros and cons for both which shows that there are some complements in the technologies.”
However, as Tinkler, points out: “Inkjet, when you compare it with other existing digital technologies, could be potentially lower in terms of capital investment, lower running cost, lower maintenance requirement, all the good stuff that people know and love about inkjet, especially if it’s aqueous inkjet, compared to electrophotographic technology.”
Epson has yet to launch its own label press, but has shown prototypes at several shows, including the last drupa and Label Expo. This is a seven colour printer, using aqueous inks. It has Epson’s MicroPiezo heads which can deliver a resolution of 720dpi and a speed of five metres a minute. Tinkler explains: “It has a 330mm web which it moves through the press, and stops and a 915mm long frame is printed and then it moves on. So you print a frame and then move it and we use a normal serial or moving head technology where you can go backwards and forwards a few times to get the best quality.”
Tinkler adds: “We have found that most people will not want to compromise on the quality they are producing just because it is a short run and in fact that becomes the most important thing, and the speed becomes incidental so long as it gets the job done. But they must have a level of quality that’s satisfactory or at least comparable with what they have to produce now.”
In contrast, EFI has opted for a single-pass approach in its Jetrion 4000 printer. Skelly explains: “We use the Xaar 1001 heads, which have very good image quality. They are a greyscale head which means you have multiple drop sizes and it allows you to get better image quality because when you need to print fine detail you can use a small drop size and when you need to print flat fields you can use a larger drop size. The other thing it has is a continuous ink supply that improves reliability so that means that the jets won’t be going out and you won’t have a jet not firing, which is [not] what you need in a production environment.”
The Jetrion 4000 can achieve speeds of between 15.2 and 30.5 metres per minute, depending on its configuration. Skelly says: “The definition of short run keeps changing and one of the reasons is that we get ever more efficient in the inkjet world, and our cost of raw materials is going down, and so that makes us even more cost competitive with a flexo press. So we can print runs of 5,000 or even up to 50,000 labels to be cost competitive with analogue presses and we expect that to go more and more.”
He says that a flexo press may only be productive for 40 per cent of its time with the rest being stoppage and make ready: “The way we think of the 4000 is that it’s very much a complement to a flexo press so you can optimise your work in your flexo press room by putting the longer jobs on your flexo press and not stopping so often and then taking the shorter run jobs and putting them on your 4000 and then you get an optimal factory output where you are not stop-starting your analogue press all the time.”
Future directions
Of course, for brand owners to be able to order a greater number of shorter runs of their labels means that there must be a direct ordering system in place, as Menegon explains: “We see this happening more and more through web-to-print which is not only for the re-ordering of existing jobs but also for the production planning. So we see some connections between an MIS at a brand owner on their production line and since they know what they need to manufacture as a product they will also know how many labels they need for a given container and a given product. This information is fed to the MIS of a printer and the production system there sends the right file at the right moment to the printing press. We haven’t standardised this yet because each brand owner has different production requirements but conceptually it’s the same.”
There is also some debate as to whether or not the label line can be integrated with the product line. Menegon says: “This is the million dollar question. You cannot imagine the number of times where we are approached by a brand owner. The problem is that they are dealing with a certain volume and none of the digital processes today can cope with that, so that even though we have a certain level of flexibility we are still far behind their production lines. But conceptually the interest is there.”
However, as he points out, printing labels still requires a level of knowledge about printing, and few brand owners really want to get their hands dirty with the actual printing, so that for the moment they are likely to continue outsourcing their label printing to specialist printers.
