Prepress

KODAK FLEXCEL NX Digital Flexographic Plates Deliver Quality, Efficiency and Consistency for Labeltronix, LLC

Monday 05. October 2009 - Label printer now exclusively using FLEXCEL NX Plates

Labeltronix, LLC, of Orange, Calif. has been serving clients in a variety of retail markets, with a particular focus on the wine industry, for more than 16 years. The company is committed to helping its clients grow by increasing productivity, reducing waste, and delivering the highest quality products at a competitive price.

Labeltronix built its business using digital print technology, expanding recently into flexo printing to meet a broader range of customer needs and to extend its offerings into longer runs and more complex label jobs. Labeltronix President John Trail and his team saw the exceptional print quality made possible by the KODAK FLEXCEL NX Digital Flexographic System and knew immediately the solution would provide a competitive advantage. They now use KODAK FLEXCEL NX Digital Flexographic Plates from the award-winning system exclusively.

“The print quality we’re able to achieve with FLEXCEL NX Plates is the best I’ve seen in the flexographic industry,” said Mark Gaw, Labeltronix General Manager. “The ink transfer is excellent. We print on a lot of difficult substrates including uncoated stock, which is one of the industry’s most challenging surfaces, and have no problem producing very high-quality results with the FLEXCEL NX Plates.”

To address the needs of its clients, Labeltronix introduced Lean Labeling, a unique go-to-market strategy that enables the ordering of labels on demand at a fixed price. Trail credits the FLEXCEL NX Plates with helping the company operate at optimum efficiency, while eliminating many of the traditional limitations imposed by the flexo process.

“Typically, the challenge flexo printers have is that when we’re printing very small dots, compression can cause us to lose some quality throughout the course of a run,” explained Trail. “We have not seen this with the FLEXCEL NX Plates. We don’t see any degradation in print quality from the beginning to the end of long runs, and the repeatability is excellent. On some jobs, we’re in excess of a million impressions on the plates.”

FLEXCEL NX Plates use the unique KODAK FLEXCEL NX Thermal Imaging Layer in conjunction with flexographic plate material. Using KODAK SQUARESPOT Imaging Technology, dots as small as 10 microns are imaged onto the FLEXCEL NX Thermal Imaging Layer. Laminating the Thermal Imaging Layer to the FLEXCEL NX Plate eliminates all oxygen between the layer and the plate, allowing the formation of stable, full-amplitude, flat-top dots.

Designed to dramatically enhance the quality of flexographic printing for applications such as tags and labels, folding cartons, and flexible packages, the FLEXCEL NX System enables offset class, gravure quality results for packaging printers and their brand owner clients. The award-winning system offers improved productivity and efficiency, and unprecedented simplicity and predictability on press. It also enables outstanding print quality on a wide variety of substrates including paper, flexible film, foil, paperboard, and label stock.

The FLEXCEL NX System was named this year as the sole recipient of the 2009 Flexographic Technical Association Technical Innovation Award. It also received the 2008 PIA/GATF InterTech Technology Award and the Flexographic Pre-Press Platemakers Association Technology Innovator of the Year Award.

“Kodak’s FLEXCEL NX Plates are a game changer for us, and are driving business with new and existing customers,” said Trail.

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