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There is an argument that finishing hasn’t kept up with the rest of print in terms of producing small volumes cost-effectively. Thanks to web-to-print and PDF workflows, jobs can flow through pre-press and onto a digital printer untouched by human hands until they hit the stacker. Unfortunately, from there it can still be a hands-on process through post-press, especially if it’s a low-volume job.

"A lot of digital jobs require finishing," says Fujipla UK sales manager Mike Kilcoyne. "Cost-per-copy may be more, but if you’re producing fewer copies you can afford to pay a bit more to improve the quality and finish."

However, if finishing machines still produce piles of makeready waste and need an operator to be tied up nursing the sheets through them, then the cost becomes prohibitive.

It was this disconnect that the Fujipla Pluster 3311 was specifically developed to bypass. The Pluster is an automatic thermal laminator for SRA3 sheets, making it ideal for the digital market.

If you’ve heard UK agent Duplo’s spiel then you can’t have missed the reference to the ‘green button’. This is nothing to do with improving your environmental credentials, but rather a pointer as to how simple the Pluster is to use.

"Our product ethos is automated precision. We want to supply machinery that is quick to set up, accurate, productive and easy to use," says Duplo marketing director Peter Jolly. "The Fujipla range is all of these. This whole trend of ‘green button’ finishing means that the guy that operates the press can run the finishing kit. If the press operators load the finishers that produce 50%-80% of the common work in the print room, the bindery guys can get on with the specialist stuff like die-cutting, photobooks and tabbing where there are healthier margins, rather than use their valuable time to feed a laminator."

Jolly believes that the simplicity of the Pluster makes it an ideal complement to Duplo’s own machines, such as the DC-445e cutter-creaser.

Big in Japan
Fujipla, which is a big deal in the office lamination market in its native Japan, based the Pluster around the laminating film developed to deal with toner-based print for that application. Any digital printer using dry toner historically used silicone oil when fusing the image – essentially a thin film of melted plastic – onto the paper. The silicone oil is there to stop the image area from sticking to the innards of the printer. However, this technique has a tendency to cause problems if you want to stick anything else to it, and lamination is essentially covering your print in sticky-backed plastic.

To get around this, Fujipla (and other lamination film firms) has come up with super-sticky formulations that overcome silicone’s slipperiness.

Later generations of digital printers have reduced the problem by reducing the amount of oil used, and with the latest toners – called chemical or emulsion aggregation as used in the light-production machines – by eliminating oil all together.

Digital printing presents other problems for lamination: heating and drying the paper during the fusing process introduces stresses that cause the paper to curl. To get around that calls for lay-flat films or decurlers that aim to even out the stresses in the sheet, which is what the three heated rollers in the Pluster do.

UK first
Fujipla has sold its double-sided Al-Meister machines into professional print markets with 50-60 sales in the UK so far, but this is its first single-sided machine in the UK market.

Its previous single-sided machine, the Pluster 3310 was, at a shade under £25,000, significantly more expensive than the latest version, the 3311, which comes in at just under £18,000, and wasn’t deemed to be right for the UK despite some success in Europe.

Differences between the two include maximum speed and the feeder. The 3310 has a deeper feed pile – 100mm as opposed to the 40mm of the 3311 – and a suction feed, while the 3311 uses rubber rollers. Kilcoyne says that in trials the rollers have yet to show any sign of marking the sheet. The other difference between the two is speed: the 3310 can run at up to 5m per minute, while the 3311 only reaches a maximum of 3m per minute.

The 3311 is optimised for digital work – there is no make-ready to speak of – there is a speed control, which adjusts output to up to 3m per minute, and a control to manage temperature, from 60-130ºC in 5ºC increments. As it’s a single-sided machine, Kilcoyne says there’s plenty of latitude for speed and temperature, regardless of stock type and weight, and he envisages most firms will run it near the maximum. Because it’s designed to be simple to use, it’s restricted to SRA3 (or thereabouts) sheets – there’s a few cm leeway of the length, but you can’t work with A4 sheets. The Pluster is a portrait-format (short-edge across) machine, which can handle paper up to a maximum width of 356mm.

However at the moment the film is only available in 317mm widths to work with sheets up to 320mm-wide (you need a little bit more paper to make sure you don’t gum up the rollers). In time, different width reels may become available.
Fujipla extrudes its own OPP film, and the reels supplied include a microchip that stores the job settings last used along with the remaining length of media. This ensures that if you switch between films, the machine knows how much material is left. "For print on demand applications, especially where you may have several different operators for the machine, the memory makes it easier to use," says Kilcoyne.

In addition to the two super-sticky digital grades, a gloss and a matt, there is a glossy stock with standard glue for litho print. With the price of 500m rolls at £167 for matt and £145 for gloss the material cost per SRA3 sheet works out at 14.5p and 16.7p.

In-house advantage
The 3m-per-minute throughput works out at six SRA3 sheets per minute or 360 per hour, which is not exactly lightning quick, but for runs of up to 500, effective and quicker than sending the work out. Kilcoyne points out that most trade houses will have a minimum job charge to cover makeready regardless of run length, so argues small volumes will work out cheaper to produce in-house, no matter what the trade unit cost is.

The clincher comes down to the cost of an operator and a combination of their skills and the hourly rate you pay for them and how much time they need to spend attending to the machine.

There are rival machines in the same price bracket that offer automatic feeding, and unattended operation (and much faster running speeds too), but Kilcoyne argues that they are still rather industrial looking.

"The Pluster looks like a photocopier – that’s intentional," he says. "In modern digital shops operators get scared by anything that looks too industrial."

When it comes down to it, anyone with digital capability currently lacking lamination who thinks their business would benefit from adding it, has to work out how sophisticated their needs are and whether easy-to-use equipment that can run unattended is a better bet than a more versatile machine that needs more TLC.

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