Benny’s back to prove that smaller is better

 

Benny Landa is the father of digital commercial printing and started the digital revolution in 1993 with the Indigo digital press. His new invention, nanography, is a whole new digital printing category. 

 

It is also a whole new opportunity for printers. Once again, Landa has revolutionised printing. I do not make these statements lightly. 

The Landa Nanographic printing process is a disruptive technology for commercial, packaging and printing. At drupa 2012, Nanographic sheetfed and web presses will have qualities and speeds similar to offset printing.

Landa NanoInk is the key. Pigment particles are only tens of nanometers in size (a human hair is about 100,000 nanometers thick), and very powerful absorbers of light to enable superb image qualities. NanoInk prints ultra-sharp dots with high uniformity and high gloss fidelity, with the broadest CMYK gamut of any printing process.

Landa Nanography prints images that are abrasion and scratch resistance. It can print on any standard substrate, from coated and uncoated paper to recycled carton stocks; from newsprint to plastic films – all without any kind of pre-treatment or special coating – and no post-drying. Nanographic images are only 500 nanometers thick, which is half the thickness of offset images and enable NanoInk to print at the lowest cost-per-page of all digital printing processes. Nanoink is water-based, energy-efficient, and eco-friendly.

The presses use inkjet-like ink ejectors to operate at very high speeds. Each Landa press, which has a very small footprint compared with other digital presses, can print in up to eight colours and can operate at 600dpi or 1,200dpi.

The complete family of sheetfed and web presses include B1, B2, and B3 perfecting presses, They can operate at up to 11,000 sheets per hour for commercial and packaging printing
as well as web presses for publishing and flexible packaging that range in width from 52cm to 104cm and operate at up to 200 metres per minute. One technology can be used with virtually any printing platform.

Nanographic presses can be applied by commercial printers and packaging converters for commercial printing, books, magazines, direct mail, labels, folding carton, and flexible packaging for food, pharmaceuticals, and more. It opens many doors for printers in terms of new markets and new products.

Landa has been working on this project for nine years and has amassed a group of 150 engineers and researchers to create what he believes will be a high-definition revolution in the printing industry comparable to what high-definition has done for television. The project has been funded entirely by Landa at a rate of about $40 million per year. Landa worked in great secrecy until recently, not even applying for patents. As Drupa approached, he applied for fifty patents to provide protection once his devices were shown publicly. Applications of the technology, as described in the patents, include everything from billboards to packaging.

The implications are significant. Commercial printers will be able to change from printing promotional products to packaging products quickly. It will broaden their base of products. 

Most importantly, this technology will break the monopoly that flexographic printing has on printing on film and flexible packaging. This market is evolving to shorter runs and there will be a need for local and regional facilities to print more jobs. As an example, offset volumes are down, but offset plate volumes are up. The reason is more short-run jobs. This will also be true in flexible packaging, but until now, the digital printing technology was not there to support
the trend. Now it is.

Nanography is the beginning of another upheaval in the way we print.

Frank Romano is professor emeritus at the Rochester Institute of Technology

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