Print Solutions
Heidelberg is driving the further development of its Versafire digital printing system for the growth market of digitally printed short runs.
The company has showcased a quality assurance system for its Versafire EP production press, plus gold and silver toners for the Versafire EV five colour system. Both these innovations emphasise the market’s growing quality requirements relating to print products produced digitally and can make users far more competitive.
Auto Color Diagnosis (ACD) is the name Heidelberg has given to a new in line quality assurance system on its Versafire EP press for high production speeds (135 A4 pages per minute). The ACD unit serves two purposes. First, the system controls the ink feed during the in line process and corrects deviations from a reference file during production. Secondly, ACD identifies errors in the print image such as streaks and marks. If an error is detected, production is automatically stopped on the Versafire EP. The operator can have an electronic image of the defective sheet displayed on a monitor, and this sheet can then be removed manually from the delivery pile.
ACD works with a scanner module that is subsequently incorporated into the fuser station in the press. The scanner reads the printed image of each individual print sheet across the entire width of the format. The print ready file calculated in the RIP and stored in the Prinect digital frontend serves as a reference.
In this way, ACD ensures a reliable and stable production operation, helping print companies that are aiming to achieve the best possible results with the highest possible productivity on their Versafire EP. During the industrial printing process, the quality assurance system ensures the press delivery pile only contains print sheets that meet the defined quality criteria. Furthermore, inking remains stable throughout the entire run.
Heidelberg will soon be offering a gold and a silver toner for selection as a fifth colour on its Versafire EV. Users of the five colour system will benefit from even greater flexibility than before when it comes to designing creative print products that make even more of an impact at the point of sale. The new toners can be used on their own or combined with the four process colours (CMYK) to create metallic colours. Applications with gold and silver are possible on white substrates, and also on dark and transparent material.
With these gold and silver toners, Heidelberg is increasing the number of spot colours for the Versafire EV to seven. The new additions join opaque white, transparent toner (coating), neon yellow, neon pink, and invisible red. Print images created using invisible red are only visible under black light. The toners are especially useful for integrating security motifs and/or hidden identifying features to protect documents from counterfeiting.
These gold and silver toners can also be retrofitted on Versafire EV models already installed.
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