Consumables
Drukkerij Geers Puts New KODAK ELECTRA XD Thermal Plate Through Its Paces
Wednesday 04. June 2008 - Ghent-based printer beta tests new KODAK ELECTRA XD Thermal Plate, alongside first European KODAK NEXPRESS S3000 Digital Production Color Press
Belgian printer Drukkerij Geers is one of the first European print sites to test Kodaks new ELECTRA XD Thermal Plate, unveiled at Drupa 2008. The company was also the first European customer to install the KODAK NEXPRESS S3000 Digital Production Color Press.
The family-owned company, which celebrates 80 years in business this year, employs 105 people in a modern 6000 m2 facility, close to Ghents picturesque canal quarter, generating turnover of 23 million Euros. The Geers brothers, Denis and Philippe, whose grandfather founded the business, have harnessed the companys long print heritage to drive substantial growth in the last eight years, with a focus on premium quality work such as art books, annual reports, glossy magazines and fine art catalogues for customers including museums, original artists and publishers. The customer base is spread across Belgium, and neighboring Netherlands and France.
Drukkerij Geers offers its customers a total package from design and digital image capture to dispatch of the finished product. Real time color management and remote and hard color proofing are critical factors in delivering to the companys stringent quality parameters which apply, according to managing director Denis Geers, whether the job in hand is a simple leaflet or a coffee-table quality art book.
The company blends offset production from its eight small- and large-format HEIDELBERG SPEEDMASTER Presses with digital output from two of Kodaks digital presses; a KODAK DIGIMASTER EX150 Digital Production System for monochrome work, and the recently launched KODAK NEXPRESS S3000 Digital Production Color Press for full color work.
With so much offset firepower under one roof, the companys plate production volumes are predictably high: 8000 plates a month come off the companys CTP system, which has deployed the original KODAK ELECTRA HRL Thermal Plate from the day of installation.
These volumes, and the exacting quality standards of Geers fine art customer base, made the company the ideal beta test site for the new KODAK ELECTRA XD Thermal Plate, making its debut at Drupa. The new plate exhibits impressive prepress and on press stability for excellent resolution, run length, and colour control throughout the full press run. Rated for unbaked run lengths of 500,000 impressions, the highly durable ELECTRA XD Plate also helps printers reduce overall plate consumption and energy usage while maintaining consistency, stability, and print quality.
Denis Geers expresses his satisfaction with the six-month test phase. “This plate has been made to meet the most challenging demands of quality printers, and is capable of perfect production in an environment where work is spread across multiple presses simultaneously, which is the case on a regular basis for us.” This durability and stability across press types, as well as the capability to print extremely fine screen dots, have proved the new plate to be more than a match for Geers portfolio, from the start of the run to the last impression.
Explaining the choice of the five-color NEXPRESS S3000 Press to complement the press line-up, Denis Geers says: “We opted for the five-color configuration because it would enable us to print not only process and Pantone colors, but also to apply a coat of varnish comparable to UV varnish, online. By avoiding the need for UV, we can varnish in a more environmentally sustainable way.” The NEXPRESS S3000 Press offers Geers potential throughput of 100 full-colour A4 sheets per minute, with a maximum format of 34 x 51 cm.
“We use the NEXPRESS S3000 Press to print art books to high quality levels, as well as personalized variable data jobs, and we use a special software package for digital photo albums”, adds Geers. “The beauty of it is that we can print on the same stocks as we use on the offset presses, at weights from 60 to 300gsm. Whats more, as with our offset presses, were able to use conventional or stochastic screening, so we have a high degree of flexibility between the two production processes.”
Investment at Drukkerij Geers has not all been channelled into print. Rapid growth has prompted the Geers brothers to invest substantially in their on-site bindery facility, with a view – ultimately – to bringing all finishing in house. Geers comments: “Finishing our own work has benefits for turnaround, especially with digital output. Going forward, our focus will be on optimising the bindery with additional investments and staff training.”
For Denis Geers, the key now is to consolidate the business as it is after a period of meteoric growth. “The craftsmanship of our team, combined with state-of-the-art equipment and consumables, gives us stable foundations on which to strengthen and build our business. Well channel our energies now into ensuring that our expanded business is robust for the future. That said, we can certainly foresee short-term growth in our digital printing business, particularly with the digital photo album applications, which chime with customer needs at the moment. On that basis, undoubtedly we are already thinking ahead, perhaps to a second NEXPRESS Press investment.”