GHENT, Belgium—Esko, a leading global supplier of integrated solutions for the packaging, labels, sign and display industries, is proud to announce that Brazilian flexographic repro house Clicheria Blumenau has installed Esko’s 3000th CDI. The CDI Spark 5080 flexo plate making system with Pixel+ is the fifth Esko CDI for the company.
Clicheria Blumenau technical manager Alexsandro Pires explains, “We chose to add a new Esko CDI to accommodate the needs of our growing business as the primary supplier of flexo plates for the Brazilian market. Over the years we have been partnering with Esko, we have been extremely pleased with the performance of Esko solutions; and we expect this new unit to deliver even more value for our customers.”
Clicheria Blumenau employs a full range of integrated Esko hardware and software solutions for flexo plate production. Besides five CDI units this includes Automation Engine, WebCenter and Equinox. The company appreciates the fact that its Esko investment over the years remains protected: all of its systems are fully compatible with each other, and its workflow solutions ensure a productive, streamlined and seamless production process.
The CDI Spark 5080 is a full sized flexo imager able to produce larger format plates for corrugated and folding carton converters. Loading and unloading of the large, thick plates is assisted by an air supported loading table that makes it easy to move plates in place, and securing them in place is just as easy with the Esko EasyClamp III pneumatic clamp.
With Pixel+, flat top dot workflows can be optimized even more for a variety of flexo plates from DuPont, McDermid and Flint, enabling individual characterization of parameters to achieve the best results for those plates. Pixel+ high frequency Microcell screens are adapted to perform at their best for each plate supplier workflow.
For Clicheria Blumenau and its customers, the combination of Esko solutions, including the new CDI Spark 5080 flexo plate making system and Esko Equinox, delivers plates with more precise registration, ideally suited to meet the growing demand for flexo plates that operate well in a fixed color palette printing process.
“Clicheria Blumenau’s dedication to customer service drives the company to make regular investments in solutions that enable it to continually enhance its production capabilities and quality. Esko CDIs aid in the achievement of this objective while at the same time delivering time and cost savings” says Luiz Furlan, Esko’s flexo business developer for Latin America.
“Hitting this 3,000 unit milestone is a huge achievement and an endorsement of the performance capabilities of our CDI technology, which is a uniquely open system for all digital flexo plates,” says Pascal Thomas, director of flexo business of Esko. “The first CDI was introduced at drupa 1995 in partnership with DuPont and its Cyrel technology, and we have followed that with more than 20 years of innovation, making Esko the leader for CTP flexo technology with a worldwide market share of more than 70 percent. This is only possible if you continuously improve the product and continually invest in research and development. At drupa 2016, we again demonstrated Esko’s innovation capabilities with a new CDI that will keep this technology at the forefront of flexo imaging for the coming years.”
New to the Esko portfolio at drupa 2016 was the CDI Crystal 5080 XPS flexo plate making system, designed to address the overriding market pressures driven by smaller lot sizes and a growing number of SKUs. It requires fast plate turnaround to address this increasing demand for product versioning, and the CDI Crystal 5080 XPS delivers that. It also brings higher quality to flexo, delivering better consistency, plate after plate, and is simple to use for operators at all skill levels. The CDI Crystal 5080 flexo plate making system innovates flexo plate making by uniquely and simultaneously exposing both sides of a flexo plate using UV LED heads. It also combines imaging and exposing into the same compact footprint. This results in 50 percent fewer manual steps, 30 percent faster access to plates and 73 percent less required operator time.