Artwork Systems strengthens digital print portfolio with HP driver

Artwork Systems has announced the introduction of a special driver for HP’s Industrial Digital Printing presses. The new driver has been specifically tuned to drive these former Indigo presses, such as the WS4050, which are increasingly used in professional label and packaging environments.

‘Artwork Systems is an established global player in developing industry-leading pre-press production and workflow software for the commercial and packaging markets, encompassing digital, litho, flexo and gravure processes,’ said Guido Van der Schueren, chairman of the board. ‘The success we have had in these areas has given our software designers an unrivalled knowledge across a wide range of printing technologies. 

‘With the development of the HP driver we can provide even further enhancements for the digital arena, where the benefits of integrating a highly automated workflow are enormous. In addition, digital printers can take advantage of Artwork Systems Certified PDF technology, which gives them the ability to have complete traceability throughout a job in the way that is already available to companies operating in more traditional sectors. This feature is particularly important to printers looking to handle, for instance, pharmaceutical work on digital output devices where accuracy is vital.

‘As a supplier of independent workflow solutions, Artwork Systems is dedicated to driving all devices that are used in the packaging and printing industries. A direct-to-press facility is a natural progression to the imagesetters, CTP, direct-to-flexo and direct-to-gravure systems for which Artwork Systems already builds dedicated drivers. The depth of experience that our software designers have gained over the years means that we can provide our workflow users with highly automated, easy to use and flexible solutions.’

A big challenge for packaging and label printers is to reproduce jobs on a digital press with as close a match as possible to that achieved via a conventional process. As most digital output equipment prints with a more limited range of inks compared to litho, flexo or gravure, reproducing the same colors has previously been difficult.  Artwork Systems’ new HP Digital Printing driver helps to overcome this hurdle by allowing printers to standardize on a set of inks, which are selected to produce a wide color gamut. 

HP users typically standardize on Indichrome inks (cyan, magenta, yellow, black, orange, violet and green) as recommended by HP.  With this standard set of seven colors, of which only six can be on the machine at the same time, a wide range of the conventional printing colors such as Pantone colors or other spot color inks can be reproduced.

Artwork Systems’ HP driver offers an automatic and flexible solution for taking PDF jobs from any environment and converting them on-the-fly to the on-board press colors. During conversion, ink usage can be optimized to ensure the greatest cost efficiency is achieved.  When colors can be reproduced within certain tolerances using fewer inks the system will automatically default to use the most economic method. The ink set used on the digital press can be altered to suit the printer’s needs. For example, pharmaceutical packaging printers might exchange violet for a reflex blue pigmented ink, or include a dedicated ink of a customer brand as one of the standard inks. 

A spot color red of a certain brand could be used as an additional color next to cyan, magenta, yellow, blue and green. The ink choice can be tailored to match any particular print run and changed easily on a daily or job to job basis.

As well as automatic color conversion, the driver is equipped with a specifically tuned engine that RIPs exactly at the HP press resolution and outputs a specific HP job ticket to the press. The first installations of the Artwork Systems HP Digital Printing driver will be carried out during Q2 with Nexus and Odystar workflows.