Sun Chemical and Esko have joined forces to provide seven-color expanded color gamut (ECG) printing at cardboard and paper packaging solution provider PAWI Verpackungen’s Swiss premises.
PAWI can now offer customers the option to use ECG printing rather than the spot color option where suitable, this will allow reduced downtime between jobs, as the seven colors are left in the press, as well as environmental benefits including energy savings and waste reduction.
Sun Chemical has been PAWI’s ink supplier for over 20 years and was recently asked to set up the ECG option on a recently acquired eight-color offset press by adding orange, green and violet. The American company managed this by deploying its own ECG solution, SunECG, part of SunColorBox.
A key component of SunECG is Esko’s color conversion software, Equinox, which identifies the exact percentage of each of the seven colors needed to reproduce the desired spot color. Impressed by the quality of the output produced over an eight week trial, PAWI now plans to offer ECG printing to customers most likely to benefit from it.
‘While seven-color printing has been around for some time, it is only in recent years that it has really become commercially viable, thanks to the improved stability of the presses and inks and the advances in the software, all supplied by our partners of choice,’ explained PAWI’s head of strategic projects Alexander Honsel. ‘We’re now looking forward to rolling out the programme in stages and to being able to offer our short-run customers the option to produce high-quality packaging products with seven-color ECG printing at a competitive cost.’
Also commenting on the collaboration, Lukas Mettler, sales director for Sun Chemical Switzerland added ‘Seven-color printing has become an excellent system to enable printers to fulfil today’s requirements efficiently and we are convinced that this system will help PAWI to meet its customers’ growing demands for more colors and, often in combination, shorter production runs and lead times. Extended color gamut printing is a very valuable tool for rationalising and streamlining the workflow process and also offers additional environmental benefits.’
