HINE LABELS’ FLAGSHIP PRESS USED TO BE the servo-controlled eight-colour MPS flexo press. The machine can print 150lpi quality and was used for all the prestigious jobs at the 25-year-old Rotherham business. It has grown up with the flexo process into a company employing 38 and generating sales of £3 million, while producing up to 500 jobs a month for trade customers.

The MPS press continues to set the standard for top-quality labels, but it has been joined by another machine whose output is an exact match to the flexo product. That machine is a Xeikon 3000 digital press. Managing director Bill Hine says: “We felt the need to have digital for a number of reasons. We didn’t want to be left behind: there is an increasing need for short runs and with digital we could offer versioning and consecutive barcodes. But what was important was that the press had to be integrated with the flexo fleet.”

That matching is performed by EskoArtwork’s Backstage suite of software applications where it has been able to adjust the PDF that is delivered to the Xeikon press so that the output is a precise match to that from the flexo machines. This is not Hine’s first Xeikon, but it is the first to offer the quality that allows the complete integration. In fact, says Hine, the Xeikon is more than capable of matching flexo. “We have had to remove quality to get it down to flexo’s level.”

What the Xeikon cannot do is print more than five colours in a pass, nor can it die cut or lay down a varnish or metallic. This is handled on a separate line after the labels have been re-reeled.

But it does offer a speed of response that flexo cannot match. Currently solvent flexo plates are imaged on a CDI unit, but this is a process that can take several hours before the plates are dry and ready for printing. Even switching to a new Cyrel plate will only improve this by half at best. “With the Xeikon we imagine we can receive a PDF in the morning, create a proof by lunchtime and have the job completed by the evening,” says Hine. “The next step would be on-screen proofing to take away the courier time, but none of the customers is ready for this yet.”

The digital machine is closer to green button printing than flexo, where experience is definitely needed, though skills are still required. “We still need to take the PDF and add spreads and chokes. The press is not absolutely perfect,” he says.

But in terms of what is possible with colour, the work that EskoArtwork has done is as close to perfect as it is possible to get. “The key stumbling block before has always been the poor colour stability of digital,” says Tony Farrall. “The new press allows us to match the Xeikon to any other printing process – litho, flexo, whatever is wanted.

“We have not touched the set-up on the Xeikon, which has its own look-up tables and Rip, but we have delivered a seamless workflow so the company can decide whether to print to the flexo Rip or the Xeikon through what is a seamless workflow.”

With EskoArtwork providing Illustrator plug-ins (to enable rapid artworking and sign-off via a version of Adobe PDF Reader) to almost all the packaging designers in the UK, the pain has been taken away from creating new package and label designs.

“It has been a very good project with Esko. The perception was that you couldn’t match across the processes, but that has been done,” says Bill Hine. “We don’t see digital as a totally different thing. It’s another press that fills a market need. There will always be a need for flexo work as there will be work that digital does. Now we can choose which we use. Some customers are still bothered by which process is used, others are driven by the price or by speed and let us decide how to produce.

“I think this is going to attract work that we haven’t seen before.”