At its annual conference, EFI Connect, held in Las Vegas 23–25 January, EFI pushed packaging to the forefront of the event’s agenda.
The company used the event to educate its customers on developments in its software and equipment products; however it was the Nozomi C18000 digital corrugated press that was given the most attention throughout the week.
The Nozomi is a single-pass piezo inkjet printer, which uses fixed array printheads with four-level grayscale and resolutions of up to 360 x 720dpi. It comes in CMYK, CMYK+W, CMYKOV, CMYKOV+W configurations and has a speed of up to 75m/min.
First worldwide Nozomi customer, Eric Bacourt, CEO at Rafael Hinojosa, a Spanish company with over 200 employees, two paper mills and seven corrugated facilities, joined EFI CEO Guy Gecht on stage for a fireside chat.
The printing company uses the latest available technology for corrugated, using both flexo post- and pre-print and flexo lamination, and gravure.
Mr Bacourt said, ‘Our idea is to bring the best tech available on the market and to look for every improvement to the customer. Speed to market is quicker and we have to be flexible. The customer is expecting the best solution to improve sells in volume price and to decrease costs we are committed to bring this to the customer, and this has not changed.’
On his decision to buy the Nozomi press, Mr Bacourt said, ‘Digital printing is something we want to grow in the future. Corrugated board is never flat, even if you are using all of your energy in controlling it, there will be some warp. Warp is the enemy of the digital inkjet technology. But the reality is you are not printing the same boards and so you have to try to reduce down times in different ways. But the speed is also improving. What we found is that this concept is better than anything else on the market.’
