US Firm Has Crush On Digital Screen Printers

Crush Creative, a west coats USA digital print houses has installed an Eagle H flatbed digital press from UK manufacturer Inca Digital Printers.

Crush Creative, a west coats USA digital print houses has installed an Eagle H flatbed digital press from UK manufacturer Inca Digital Printers.

The new digital flatbed press was installed by Sericol, which also supplies the UV inks used in the Inca printer and is the worldwide Inca Digital distributor.

The Inca Eagle is Crush Creative's first digital flatbed press and can handle work as large as 1.6 x 2.44 metres with resolutions up to 800 simple headline dpi claimed Inca.

The Eagle H provides claimed output speeds of up to 100 square meters an hour.

It can print edge-to-edge, with the level of precision allowing images to be printed to bleed, removing the need for subsequent trimming.

"When you look at how digital output technology has developed over the last few years, combined with the huge advances in inkjet printing, it is clear that there is an increasing shift in how certain work is produced," said Crush Creative director of sales Barry Polan.

"We have a completely digital workflow and the Eagle fits seamlessly into it.

We did not feel that conventional screen printing equipment would have matched our current digital workflow the same way," he added.

The launch of the Columbia and Eagle digital flatbed presses from UK manufacturer Inca allows companies to handle work digitally that would previously have had to be produced on a conventional screen press claimed the company.

"The Eagle has enabled us to bring in-house much of the work previously considered to be traditional screen print.

We are continuing to expand the variety of stock and jobs put on the new equipment.

We have already printed successfully on to substrates ranging from foam core to polystyrene, as well as unique substrates such as ceramic tile and corrugated metal," commented Polan.

Crush Creative was formed 30 years ago to serve the photographic market and so has a strong history in producing top quality images.

The company now employs 150 people, producing jobs ranging form indoor displays to outdoor billboards, vehicle graphics and stadium graphics.

The Los Angeles premises houses a wide range of grand format devices including a Vutek 5300, a 3M Scotchprint 2000, several Lambda digital printers, a Lightjet 5000 and a Heidelberg QMDI digital offset press.

"We researched all the leading suppliers of this technology but Inca came out ahead in terms of quality and productivity.

The Eagle gives us a huge competitive advantage and since its installation has proved its reliability, quickly becoming a profit centre in its own right.

We operate a 24 hour service and the Eagle is already in use 12 hours a day," added Polan.

He continued to say that throughput on the Eagle was increasing all the time, with the press being as cost effective outputting one copy as it was for medium runs.

The equipment had fitted into the company's existing digital workflow very well and was so straightforward to use that, once the initial training had been completed, the company simply carried out its own in-house training from then on.

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