Nano News Is Good News: 2015 Looks to Be the Year for Nanography Installs

It may be the most anticipated machine since the iPhone. Unveiled at drupa 2012 with much fanfare, it’s seemingly been in development limbo ever since, with occasional tantalizing updates to keep everyone talking about it—and, as Oscar Wilde said, “the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.”

It is Landa Digital Printing’s Nanographic Printing Press. Several sheetfed and webfed models are in development, with two models of the sheetfed S10 slated to be first out of the gate: a single-sided press for folding carton and point-of-purchase/point-of-sale (POP/POS) will be the first to market, followed by a perfecting press for general commercial print work. Webfed models will follow.

Wrote Benny Landa in a blog post in December: “[H]ere we are, 30 months after we promised that our Nanographic Printing presses would perform to perfection, but the first one has yet to be delivered to a customer. Yes, we did warn that ‘perfection takes time,’ but it is taking more time than we had predicted. The reasons? Well, there are two.”

Those two reasons were 1) the need to improve print quality, and 2) feedback from customers indicated that certain aspects of the machine needed to be re-engineered. For one, customers wanted inline coating capabilities. Still, 2015 is said to be the year that beta customers will finally be able to get their hands on a machine. And it will be a very different machine than what had been unveiled at DRUPA 2012; it’s certainly heavier. Wrote Landa, “If our top-of-the-line Landa S10 press then weighed 10 tons, our fully-loaded Landa S10 Nanographic Printing Press with inline coating now weighs over 30 tons!”

“We’re doing a lot of testing,” said Gilad Tzori, Landa Digital Printing’s VP of Product Strategy. “Towards the middle of the year, we will invite customers to start doing their own testing on our presses using their substrates and their jobs. We expect in the summer 2015 to ship the first machine to beta customers.”

Landa has a reputation to consider—it was Benny Landa’s Indigo that arguably invented what we know today as digital printing—and is thus why the company has become what could be called “the Paul Masson of digital printing”: they will sell no press before its time.

“Over the last six months, we did a lot of user experience testing,” said Tzori. “We got good and positive response from many people, as well as finding that we need to do some adjustment and corrections. All this is now embedded in the design and added to the beta units that will be shipped to the customers.”

Speaking of design, Landa Digital Printing is touting its touchscreen-based user interface and, in fact, a whole new consideration of the working conditions of the operator.

Tzori cites as an analogy John Deere’s approach to improving the comfort of tractor operators. “For many years, the tractor driver was sitting outside in the sun and the rain,” he said. After enclosing the driver in a cabin with air conditioning, noise reduction, and radio systems, “productivity improved significantly. We believe in the same approach. We believe in giving the operator conditions to work in a better way.” Not that today’s pressrooms are Dickensian workhouses, but Landa has given a lot of thought to maximizing operator comfort, ergonomics, as well ease of control over the press’ operations. “We give him the feeling that he is important and the press is under his control.”

A Landa Digital Printing white paper published in January emphasizes the necessity of adopting a touchscreen interface that emulates the look and feel of smartphones. “People touch their smartphones an average of 150 times a day,” said Louis Gordon, Marcom Manager for Landa Digital Printing. “We’re trying to make them feel that the technology of the press has caught up with the 21st century, at least in terms of the user interface, instead of having dials or keys to make adjustments.”

Much of the redesign and re-engineering work the company has done has involved the Operator Cockpit, the result of extensive worldwide user research. It’s located at the delivery end of the press, set at a 45-degree angle relative to the press. It offers direct visual contact with the delivery tray while the user is inspecting jobs or performing other press-related activities.

“Depending on the placement of the inspection table, they can’t see the press and what’s going on if they’re inspecting something,” said Gordon. “But by putting the cockpit at an angle and attached, you can inspect a sheet, look at a video of what is going on, look at the vital signs, ink levels, and see what’s coming out into the delivery stack.”

The Cockpit is almost like a semi-private office; it features drawers and cabinets for supplies and personal items, places to hold pens, cables, and mobile phones—it’s even got a cup holder.

“It goes back to the idea of efficiency in having a more pleasant user experience,” said Gordon.

Improvements have also been made to the Landa NanoInk.

“Our Landa NanoInk colorants are now visibly delivering on their promise: brilliant, deep pure colors, razor-sharp text and edges, nano-thin images that replicate the gloss of any off-the-shelf paper and more,” wrote Landa in his December blog post.

“Our pigments are nano-sized—in the range of under 100 nanometers—which gives us a lot of advantages,” said Tzori. “We get a wider color range because of the distribution of light from nano particles.” The system can also lay down a thinner ink film on the substrate, “which eventually leads to using less ink on the paper which means the customer pays less for the same printed sheet.” NanoInk is water- rather than solvent-based, which has an environmental advantages over solvent inks, which can release harmful and unpleasant volatile organic compounds (VOCs).

NanoInk also has benefits that are specific to packaging.

“The big advantage is you can practically eliminate the need to use special colors,” said Tzori. “Instead of using special color mixing, you can digitally mix any color on the press. In the packaging world, this is critical because all the special brand colors that are needed. This really makes things much faster.”

There is also the much-vaunted ability to print on a very wide variety of substrates. “The fact that you can print on any substrate is big,” said Tzori. “We don’t have a need for priming, pretreatment, or optimizing the substrate. You can use the same substrate you are using today with a flexo machine or folding carton press. This is a huge advantage.”

The beta customers for the forthcoming S10 have not yet been made public, but given the level of interest in the Nanographic Press, that will likely change. And Landa is already looking forward to drupa 2016, where the company will occupy twice as much space as it did in 2012.

“We recently shared the latest print samples with a very selective group of people and we got very positive feedback about what we have shown in terms of color gamut, the ability to print very fine details and text, gloss of the image matched the gloss of the paper, and color consistency was there,” said Tzori. “It gave us a lot of encouragement that we are on the right track and we are doing something that people are looking for.”

Read the Fine Print

Reproducing fine detail in imagery has been the perennial goal for any printing system be it digital or analog, but in today’s packaging environment, is only part of the battle. Packaging printers do indeed need to sweat the small stuff—and a greater variety of small stuff.

“There is a greater emphasis now on product identification requirements,” said Erik Norman, Vice President of Sales and Marketing for Reprographic Technology Inc. (RTI). RTI’s Vortex 850 is a benchtop, Memjet-based continuous-form label printing system. “People want to see all the full ingredients of something, or there are GHS [OSHA’s Globally Harmonized System of Classification and Labelling of Chemicals] changes or FDA compliance requirements. Now you have this brandowner who still wants to make a very high-impact, compelling label with full bleeds and beautiful colors, but also have all of this fine-detail text. With a high-resolution digital printer, you can do all of that in one pass.”

Back at DRUPA 2012, Xeikon attracted some attention by printing, on each of its employees’ business cards, the full text of the Declaration of Independence, perfectly legible in one-point type. “Our idea in printing one-point text was to show the ability of our technology to produce fine details with crispness and sharpness,” said Aditya Dwivedi, Xeikon’s Director of Marketing & Sales Support. “All the latest Xeikon models print at a resolution of 1200 dpi and have this capability.” It’s not just about cramming a lot of text in a small space, however. “We have also demonstrated applications where printing of fine text can be used for anti-counterfeiting,” added Dwivedi, “because most counterfeiters either might not see the small text, especially if it is cleverly hidden in the design, or even if they see it, they won’t be able to reproduce it.”

Regulatory compliance and brand protection are two increasingly important issues for brandowners and, therefore, their print packaging suppliers