Shilp Gravures, one of Asia’s largest gravure cylinder makers, has become the first company in India to install the Kodak Flexcel NX Wide 50×80 system. The investment in Kodak’s Flexcel NX technology underpins Shilp Gravures’ strategy and confidence in the system to help grow its flexography business.
Explaining how the company chose to invest in their new flexo plate-making setup, Gajanan Bhavsar, marketing director at Shilp Gravures, said, “The market and our customers demand higher levels of productivity and improved output. There is a realization that flexo quality today rivals gravure, while also reducing the number of colors on press. With the Flexcel NX System and plates, Kodak has better technology on offer and also the capability of imaging a 50 x 80 flexo plate – a first for India, that enables us to efficiently make large-format plates. With this, we can also cater to the demands of corrugation industry. We have observed smoother vignettes and better solid ink density with Kodak’s NX digital flexo plates, meaning we can use higher screens and really bump up quality. Add to this enhanced ink transfer capacity and higher resolution with flat top dots, and we get a quality plate that allows for fine image reproduction that delivers superior output with today’s new, high-tech CI and label presses.”
Flexography, especially with Kodak’s Flexcel NX technology, has made a tremendous footprint in labels and tags and now has lived up to the expectations of flexible packaging gravure converters too. Gradually, flexography is becoming their first choice as every gravure converter is investing in a CI press. This is following a trend earlier witnessed in Europe and the US, where the number of flexography presses now rival that of gravure presses.
“In the flexible converting space, the West of India has been a sort of ‘Silicon Valley’ as more and more wide-web CI flexo presses are installed. Hence, Shilp Gravures’ choice of installing in a Wide 50 x 80 flexo platemaking system is apt to cater to the demand on these presses,” says Abraham Prabhakar, vice president for flexographic packaging division, Kodak India.
Increasingly, customers in India and around the world from the flexo printing, packaging, and branded-goods industries are opting Kodak’s differentiated flexo technology to drive growth. The Kodak Flexcel NX System has fundamentally changed and redefined flexographic plate making and printing all over the world. It delivers high performing digital flexo plates for the widest variety of package printing applications and enables printers to drive towards their environmental sustainability goals. And with a cost-effective flexo print process, Kodak Flexcel NX technology delivers quality levels that rival offset and gravure printing.
Bhavsar added, “Kodak and their technology has been serving the printing and graphic arts industry since a long time. Their local service as well as continuous efforts with global R&D are a good fit. This recent addition of the Flexcel NX Wide 50 x 80 system blends well with our existing setup and helps us be future ready.”
The Kodak Flexcel NX system will be demonstrated at Shilp Gravures’ stand H7A12, Hall 7 at Plastindia 2018 which takes place in Gandhinagar from 7 to 12 February 2018.
