Czech printer boosts productivity with Asahi

‘With the flexo plates we were using, we had excessive stop times to clean or replace plates,’ commented Bohdan Holona, manager of Desktop Publishing, an in-house design studio at Colognia Press. ‘For long-run jobs, this meant half of the time printing the product was downtime. Even for shorter runs, we were not happy with the color consistency from the beginning to end of the job. Changing or cleaning the plates can often negatively affect the quality of the product. After thorough research from our press team, we finally found the perfect solution.

‘Now, we can do almost any job, totaling scores of kilometers, without stopping. We even ran a 22-hour job with one set of plates, no stops, and with very consistent quality from beginning to end. It’s been amazing.’

Asahi’s pinning technology is said to enable clean ink transfer and prevent ink accumulating on the plate surfaces and shoulders in screen areas.

Colognia Press has also been able to print small labels with small text in tiny Asian script – 1mm in height. ‘Now with Asahi plates, this text is very legible,’ said Holona. ‘This was something we could not do before, and this important customer is very, very happy. That’s good news for both of us.’

Other claimed benefits include shorter set-up times between jobs. And when plate changes are required during press checks, they can be accomplished in two hours or less with minimal substrate testing required at the beginning to achieve high resolution output with plastics, paper, shrink sleeves, tube laminates, textured substrates and other materials,

Colognia Press uses a tool from Plantyst to gather real-time data about its operation. ‘This allowed us to see any machine’s production efficiency in real time,’ added Holona. ‘So we know for absolute certainty that these results are accurate. Our press uptime was 20-25 percent with our previous plates. Now we are seeing uptimes of 50 percent or more on most days.’

Asahi Photoproducts will be showing AWP water-washable flexo plates at Labelexpo Europe 2017.

Read L&L’s Labelexpo Europe 2017 new product showcase in issue 4, 2017