New Driver For HP Label And Pack Digital Presses

Artwork Systems has introduced a driver for HP's industrial digital printing presses that has been specifically tuned to drive the former Indigo machines.

Artwork Systems has introduced a driver for HP's industrial digital printing presses that has been specifically tuned to drive the former Indigo machines.

Those presses include the WS4050 amongst others, which are increasingly used in labelling and packaging companies.

According to Artwork Systems, a big challenge for packaging and label printers is to reproduce jobs on a digital press with as close a match as possible to that achieved via a conventional process.

As most digital output equipment prints with a more limited range of inks compared to litho, flexo or gravure, reproducing the same colours has previously been difficult.

Artwork Systems' new HP digital printing driver is claimed to help overcome that hurdle by allowing printers to standardise on a set of inks, which are selected to produce a wide colour gamut.

HP users typically standardise on Indichrome inks (cyan, magenta, yellow, black, orange, violet and green) as recommended by HP.

With the standard set of seven colours, of which only six can be on the machine at the same time, a range of the conventional printing colours, such as Pantone colours or other spot colour inks can be reproduced, said the company.

Artwork Systems' HP driver is said to offer an automatic and flexible system for taking PDF jobs from any environment and converting them on-the-fly to the on-board press colours.

During conversion, ink usage can be optimised to ensure the greatest cost efficiency is achieved.

When colours can be reproduced within certain tolerances using fewer inks the system will automatically default to use the most economic method.

The ink set used on the digital press can be altered to suit the printer's needs.

For example, pharmaceutical packaging printers might exchange violet for a reflex blue pigmented ink, or include a dedicated ink of a customer brand as one of the standard inks, added the company.

A spot colour red of a certain brand could be used as an additional colour next to cyan, magenta, yellow, blue and green.

The ink choice can be tailored to match any particular print run and changed on a daily or job to job basis.

As well as automatic colour conversion, the driver is equipped with a specifically tuned engine that RIPs exactly at the HP press resolution and outputs a specific HP job ticket to the press, commented Artwork Systems.

The first installations of the Artwork Systems HP digital printing driver will be carried out during the second quarter of this year with Nexus and Odystar workflow systems.

Guido Van der Schueren, chairman of Artwork Systems, said: "Artwork Systems is an established global player in developing industry-leading pre-press production and workflow software for the commercial and packaging markets, encompassing digital, litho, flexo and gravure processes.

The success we have had in these areas has given our software designers an unrivalled knowledge across a wide range of printing technologies." He added: "With the development of the HP driver we can provide even further enhancements for the digital arena, where the benefits of integrating a highly automated workflow are enormous.

In addition, digital printers can take advantage of Artwork Systems' certified PDF technology, which gives them the ability to have complete traceability throughout a job in the way that is already available to companies operating in more traditional sectors.

This feature is particularly important to printers looking to handle, for instance, pharmaceutical work on digital output devices where accuracy is vital." Van der Schueren explauined that as a supplier of independent workflow systems, Artwork Systems is dedicated to driving all devices that are used in the packaging and printing industries.

A direct-to-press facility is a natural progression to the imagesetters, CTP, direct-to-flexo and direct-to-gravure systems for which Artwork Systems already builds dedicated drivers.

And he said: "The depth of experience that our software designers have gained over the years means that we can provide our workflow users with highly automated, easy to use and flexible systems.".

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