HP’s ‘Digital Print for Corrugated’ Summit: Getting the Ecosystem Right

Color digital printing for packaging so far has been mainly for primary package printing—first in color digital labels, where brand owners now spend about $3.2 billion annually, and more recently in folding cartons and flexible packaging, where digital print is really just getting started. Another digital category, though, is emerging, and that is corrugated package printing, mostly for secondary packs and displays, and typically produced by specialist converters. Corrugated is now clearly a color print market, and one where several inkjet vendors are now participating.

One of those suppliers, Hewlett Packard, recently hosted over 100 guests in Atlanta for a conference about color digital printing for corrugated packaging. While most attendees were prospects—dozens of corrugators and sheet printers, most from North America, but some from as far as China—there were also current users of HP Scitex flatbed inkjet printers for corrugated, and there were also HP technology partners, such as Esko (cutting tables), Lamina (folder gluers), and Kiwiplan (corrugated manufacturing software). The overall impression from HP’s “Summit” meeting that digital print for corrugated is part of a big ecosystem, one with its own users, apps, and suppliers, and one where HP is now engaged with multiple solutions, partners, and prospects.

HP’s event included some tuition about that wider corrugated market, which has bloomed in terms of color graphics because of the needs of brands and retailers. Over the last 20 years, corrugated has been used more and more to market products and not just transport them, in the process making fine graphics printing a small but growing share of all corrugated for secondary and even primary packaging, as well as free standing displays.

Nearly all corrugatd printed today is printed by analog presses, whether directly by flexo or screen, or indirectly by printing in offset a sheet of liner material and then laminating it to board stock. That said, many inkjet flatbeds from HP and its competitors now complement that analog printing of corrugated. These digital systems create prototypes that can later be reprinted in much bigger analog runs, and they also print short production runs to target markets, such as to place one display for use in each of 500 stores. These digital print runs are valuable because they allow quick, cost effective response to orders for tests and for jobs needing just hundreds or low thousands of pieces, and because they free up analog presses to just print long runs. (These same forces are driving color digital printing in all the main packaging applications, each of which is a focus of InfoTrends’ annual forecast http://store.infotrendsresearch.com/product_p/140581.htm)

HP Scitex FB 15000

HP’s Atlanta event was mostly about HP Scitex flatbeds, especially the HP Scitex 15000 Corrugated Press (2014) and the HP Scitex FB10000 Industrial Press (2013). These UV inkjet printers, which share the same print engine, are at least the third generation of Scitex flatbed to print corrugated with process colors, but they’re the first to make corrugated packaging a key focus. HP Scitex FB10000 and 15000 feature a 3.2 meter X 1.6 meter flatbed and are the first HP printers to use the company’s own High Dynamic Range (HDR) piezoelectric heads. The HDR heads offer variable drop sizes to achieve 16 levels of gray scale and 600 dpi resolution; a total of 312 heads, or 52 per color, are mounted in a stationary array and are subject to an automated cleaning cycle; both printers use pigmented UV inks in CMYK colors, plus light cyan and light magenta.

The two printers do have differences. The HP Scitex FB10000 (2013) is designed for versatility—it prints various board media, from corrugated to foam core and other synthetics, up to 25 mm (1”) thick, thus it’s good for both corrugated packaging and displays and also the signage market. The HP Scitex 15000 is instead designed just for corrugated and other wood fiber-based board, and it has one more key difference—where the FB10000 is “3/4” automated for loading, HP Scitex 15000 is fully automated, and can thus run unattended.

Each system has the same productivity, up to 120 beds per hour (600 square meters or 6,458 square feet); for perspective, each can print 1,000 B1-size sheets in about two hours. Each printer also benefits from an attribute first noticed in the HP Scitex FB10000, that the HDR UV inks, once cured, bend and stretch without cracking, an important benefit to converting any three dimensional packaging. Finally, both printers benefit from HP SmartStream print management software, whose big GUI displays an array of reports, on ink usage by color, printhead hours and status, operator efficiency, etc.

The Wider Ecosystem

As mentioned early on, the corrugated market is an ecosystem, and there are clear signs that inkjet flatbeds such as HP’s are becoming an accepted part of it. Some of the conference participants were big, integrated companies such as Rock Tenn and Pratt Industries, each of which already uses inkjet flatbeds for packaging. There were many much smaller companies attending, though, mainly corrugators and independent sheet printers like Duso Box and Kelly Box & Packaging; most of these companies are inkjet prospects rather than users today, but they were clearly receptive to HP’s pitch about inkjet printing. The main reason: brands want to target markets and cut time to market for new products; in turn, they’re ordering corrugated print more frequently and in smaller amounts, putting stress on printers who have only conventional presses.

A last note: HP’s Atlanta Summit also reminded attendees that HP is addressing the wider packaging market with equipment besides the HP Scitex flatbed portfolio. In corrugated, HP offers another product entirely, the HP T400 Simplex Color Inkjet Web Press. Based on thermal inkjet, this system is a 40” wide, single pass CMYK press that has many installations for commercial printing of books and other documents, with print speed up to 400 linear feet per minute. In the case of corrugated media, the HP T400 does not print board directly, but rather it prints liner media; the output is later laminated to corrugated board, in effect a digital alternative to litho lam.

One beta unit of the HP T400 “High-speed Inkjet Corrugated Packaging Solution” was placed last year with corrugator Obaly Morava in Czech Republic (http://store.infotrendsresearch.com/product_p/142808.htm). Finally, there are the HP Indigo liquid toner electrophotographic presses for other packaging; these are dedicated systems, first for labels, and more recently for folding cartons and flexible packaging. Just as in the corrugated market, for each of these applications HP aims to work with the ecosystem around it, enhance the existing print uses and, wherever possible, bring really new printing to established markets.