Prepress
Flint Group and Dynagraph Add Colour to the Middle East and Africa
Wednesday 07. December 2016 - Dynagraph, the oldest operating reseller of printing equipment, supplies and services in the Middle East, a pioneer in the industry and a key partner for Flint Group, will soon open a brand new sheetfed spot colour mixing facility in Al Quoz Industrial Area, Dubai. Distributors of sheetfed and web offset inks for Flint Group for 9 years, Dynagraph has a well-deserved reputation for technical expertise and service excellence. Now customers in the region can expect the same high quality service from the new colour mixing laboratory when it opens later this month.
Antoine El Kara, Managing Director of Dynagraph, is very enthusiastic about this latest strengthening of the partnership with Flint Group. Mr. El Kara comments, “We take great pride in the inauguration, with Flint Group, of the first offset ink mixing shop in the Middle East region. This service answers a growing demand for special colours with short delivery times and has a yearly production capacity of around 150-200 tonnes. The reason for the companys longevity and success lies in our proximity to the market, where we maintain an impressive and much envied sales, service and logistic network of subsidiaries and branch offices. This new venture into sheetfed spot colour production only enhances our product range, technical capabilities and market footprint.”
Working alongside Dynagraph on this spot colour mixing project in the Middle East is a key building block of Flint Groups service strategy, focusing on creating a consistent, high quality and reliable partnership with end user customers globally. This is especially important to packaging printers working with large brand owners who must be able to faithfully reproduce a wide variety of customers house colours, regardless of substrate or production deadlines.
“We realised some time ago that the Middle East region was in need of a high quality spot colour mixing service,” says Steven Haig, Flint Groups Sheetfed Sales Director for the region. “So we began discussions with Dynagraph at the beginning of 2015, and its very pleasing to now see this project finally come to fruition. We have every confidence in Antoine and the teams ability to deliver the highest quality mixes to printers across the Middle East, time after time.”
At the heart of the fully automated system is a Vale Tech HP35 ink dispenser (pictured left), which accurately measures out each base colour according to pre-determined recipes. A Color-Mix Jet Mixer then perfectly blends those dispensed base colours and Teknimek proofers help the operators to ensure the shade is correct. X-Rite Spectrophotometers accurately measure the original colour shade to help specify the correct ink formula to programme the Vale Tech computer. As part of the partnership agreement, Flint Group technicians will support Dynagraph through the installation and start-up phase, to provide training, guidance and advice.
In addition to this, Dynagraph will be linked to Flint Groups Global Colour Centre in Poland, which provides a web-based automated colour matching solution. The system consists of a dedicated, managed internet production server running X-Rite Ink Formulation software in which colourant files for widely used ink systems and substrates have been installed. It is designed to reduce costs and, at the same time, improve the efficiency and accuracy of colour matching done at remote locations such as Flint Group authorised distributor partners and end users.