Speaking as the firm opened its new digital printing facility in Cambridge (see separate story here) Philip Easton, director of the firm’s digital printing division, described packaging printing as a likely area for future development.
“At the moment we are focused on being really good at label printing, but packaging is a natural place for Domino to go,” he said.
The firm has been working on a number of enhancements to its N610i digital label press, which prints at up to 75m/min.
The N610i has the facility to have two white print heads, for a highly-opaque, smooth white result.
Additional orange and violet heads for an extended colour gamut are slated for later this year. Also new is a chilled roller for handling ‘sensitive’ substrates, and a universal interface to allow a variety of label finishing kit to run inline with the press.
Easton claimed the combination of features in the N610i offered users the highest quality and productivity. “All inkjet solutions are not the same. We do things differently to others in the marketplace,” he stated.
However, he ruled out the addition of laser-cutting to the system for the time being. “The big issue is productivity. Laser-cutting is very slow and we have one of the fastest machines. We’ve got a watching brief on it.”
Easton also described the firm's K600i overprinting system, which uses some of the same technologies as the N610i, as a “fantastic success” with more than 100 print modules sold. “We had not envisaged this product would be so successful,” he said.
“The glossy impact of the UV ink has really taken off in North America."
The K600i can be configured with multiple 108mm-wide print bars to create bespoke print widths for different end-user applications. The widest standard specification is 558mm but Domino has also created a 780mm-wide version for one customer.
It is now available with a new aqueous ink to provide a lower-cost solution for users printing onto porous materials such as forms and envelopes.
Separately, Domino subsidiary Graph-Tech, which Domino acquired in the summer of 2012, has installed its first MonoCube system at a German direct mail printer. Further sales of the compact, high-speed inkjet system have been made to transactional and book printers.
