Paperboard Packaging - 2012 Buyers Guide

Grafisk Maskinen, and with design and workflow software supplier Esko Artwork and others, to establish full print solutions. The upshot in the last few years has been that folding carton printing has become a side application for a small but growing number of label converters, and a main application for a small band of specialist converters.

Finding a Sweet Spot

What does that color digital printing look like? The output is almost all small boxes for primary packaging, printed in full process color onto coated SBS board or similar media. Makers of drugs, cosmetics, software, and some specialty foods and dry goods have been customers. For the converters, the “sweet spot” is to have key brand owner clients who have a regular need for short runs, or for printing that is “variable,” such as personalized boxes.

Odyssey Digital Print, Tulsa, Okla., which uses a Xeikon color digital press, is well known as the printer of golf ball cartons for Titleist. With Odyssey’s help, Titleist sells boxes of golf balls customized with a photo of the customer’s golf course or with text particular to an event, individual or company. Mediaware in Ireland uses Xerox iGen to print folding cartons for many customers; its biggest is Microsoft, for which it prints software packaging in multiple languages for shipment to dozens of countries. While Odyssey and Mediaware are digital-only print shops, there are many conventionally equipped label converters that now print folding cartons for their own brand owner customers, offering them the same convenience of short-run printing for folding cartons that they value already for label printing.

What about the future? While there is no game-changing color digital press in the offering, there are plenty of signs that color digital printing will gain more folding carton business. The most important sign is that brand owners want short-run printing, whether for target marketing or tests or just to achieve lean manufacturing.

Another sign is that the digital press vendors are committed and are moving ahead. Xeikon, for instance, achieved the widest single pass color electrophotographic print web of 20. 5 inches with its Xeikon 3500 by inventing a new toner application method, one that could be used for still wider webs. Meanwhile Xerox, a top supplier of color digital printers to commercial

Odyssey Digital Print, Tulsa, Okla., prints customized golf ball
cartons for Titleist on a color digital press.

There are plenty of signs that color digital printing will gain more folding carton business.

The Xeikon 3500 is one color digital press that can print cartons.

printing companies, has joined the fray. Since 2009 the company has offered converters a complete folding carton solution built around its famous Xerox iGen 4 sheetfed press and finishing equipment from a technology division of Stora Enso.

A last note about technology ahead concerns inkjet. Color inkjet presses are much rarer than toner-based systems, especially for folding cartons, because the technology is younger and most often is narrower than toner-based equipment. There is one key exception in terms of inkjet press width, though, and that is the Agfa Dotrix, a hybrid press with both inkjet and flexo stations that has the largest print width of all color digital presses, at 25. 5 inches. Inkjet color presses in general commercial printing can already go much wider still, and also much faster: the HP T300, used so far for book and document printing, has a 42-inch print width and prints in full process color at up to 300 feet per minute.

Many companies besides Agfa and HP are working to make inkjet better and more relevant to industrial applications such as folding cartons. Among these companies are makers of inkjet print heads such as Konica Minolta, Memjet, and Xaar that are packing more inkjet nozzles per inch into the heads, increasing reliability and resolution and cutting costs.

Given all these considerations – the success of color digital in printing prime labels, the commitment of key vendors, and the desire of brand owners for short-run printing – Info Trends believes that color digital, both electrophotographic and inkjet, will increasingly share in the job of printing folding cartons. PBP