Digital flexo’s slow growth in India

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Gravure is way ahead of flexo in India thus far. Five to ten electronic engravers for gravure cylinder making are imported each year while thus far there is a total of only two digital flexo devices in the country. For flexo to leverage its combined strengths of faster and less expensive prepress, both the quality of flexo plates and the time needed to actually make them needs to be brought down to minutes instead of the many hours required by conventional exposing and processing. Even using digital imagers brings down the exposing time of flexo plates but it does not eliminate the slow processing, washing, drying, and curing steps that take several hours. Thus one of the most interesting new developments is the direct laser engraving of ready to print flexo plates. One looks forward to new developments in this area from Hell, Creo, Zed Instruments of the UK, and Jet in Japan. DuPont’s Cyrel Fast technology, which removes the non-image areas heated up during exposure with rough cloth-like rollers, is also interesting for speeding up the flexo prepress process. ...cont´d

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