There’s more to print than just the print. As offset printer know full well, embellishing with specialty embossings, foil, lamination or a fifth colour such as a metallic turn a bog standard process colour sheet into a high-value product. Embellishing can turn an also-ran job into an advertisement for your company and a lure for repeat orders.

That’s all true for litho, but what about digital? Digital production printing has all but closed the gap with lithography in quality for certain applications, and embellishing is no exception. What’s more, many of these flashy added extras are available as run-of-press, which removes outsourcing and double-handling and should increase margins.

But none of this is free. So is inline embellishment worthwhile, or should you be adding those extras offline in a different workflow from your pressroom, or perhaps outsourcing to specialists?

Opinions vary but one point stands out with the printers ProPrint canvassed: a major drawcard of commercial digital is small volumes with rapid turnarounds; the window for performing these tasks off the press or off-site is tiny.

Adding it inline

Kodak’s print solutions manager, Darren Yeates, says the NexPress SX3300 is fully loaded for embellishment. Onboard features include a UV coater, MICR solution, dimensional coating, red fluorescing and gold effects.

On the SX3300, gold, then pearlescent, are judged the two most popular specialty colours, followed by effects such as UV-illuminating fluorescents, overall and spot glosses, protective coatings, watermarks, 3D, and MICR security ink for transactional documents.

“These features allow print service providers to save time, money and labour, and realise hours of uninterrupted operation – ideal for print operations that value a high level of automation in a manufacturing-like environment,” Yeates tells ProPrint. “It also provides a way to differentiate your business.”

Adelaide’s Five Star Print, which offers wide-format, production digital and offset, ordered its Kodak NexPress SX3300 with a host of inline capabilities, including raised ink and all-over high gloss.

Managing director Carolyn Cagney says if these embellishments were added offline or were outsourced, it would create unacceptable cost and time margins. “You don’t have time with digital to be shifting work around.”

Five Star ordered its SX3300 with these features onboard and Cagney says the company is happy with how the press performs the extra inking and glossing.

Cagney is interested in the newly released gold dry ink feature on the SX3300, available from mid-year, with a pearlescent dry ink later in the year and a pink neon in 2014, through Konica Minolta under its Kodak distribution agreement. The specialty colours work with NexPress’s fifth unit. She says she is looking closely at gold but would like to see how it prices – and also how it performs on coated, rather than the uncoated stock demonstrated by Kodak.

Theo Pettaras, managing director of Sydney’s Digitalpress, specialises in short runs of high-value digital. For the eight-year-old Surry Hills company with a staff of 14, digital accounts for around 80% of orders, while offset runs are outsourced. 

Digitalpress can produce a number of value-adds, like dimensional printing, spot varnishing and high glossing on its NexPress SE3000. Pettaras is a disciple of digital run-of-press embellishing, citing “the value add, the cost effectiveness and the efficiency” as grounds for keeping it onboard rather than near-lining or outsourcing.

Where inline enhancements really shine is in packaging and labelling. In addition to its specialties for commercial print, HP Indigo offers the pack and label market an array of solutions. Avery Dennison’s Retail Branding and Information Solutions (RBIS) division uses a global Indigo fleet to produce branding and information solutions for apparel retailers. RBIS, a major world player in sustainable packaging, apparel embellishments and RFID, is replacing offset with Indigo for quality retail, but with better productivity and sharper turnarounds. 

Taking it offline

Sometimes it has to be finished offline but that does not necessarily mean sending it to a trade specialist. Printers are investing heavily in specialty gear for the bindery and the marketplace is buzzing.

One example is UK manufacturer Autobond, which first announced its spot UV (SUV) technology back at Ipex 2010, but it was not shown until 2011. Now, it can’t keep up with demand – local distributor Graph-Pak wanted to show a machine at PacPrint, but couldn’t get it built in time.

The innovative SUV technology can be added to the delivery end of an Autobond laminator to allow inline production of spot UV and lamination. Autobond launched its new B2-format 52 SUV-SDF offline spot UV laminator to the world at Drupa, where it also demonstrated the Mini 36 TPM-36 SUV, its first spot UV laminator.

Scodix has added metallics to the finishes on its machines. The metallic process uses Scodix PolySense clear polymer to lift the gloss of the underlying substrate. The offline digital embellish-ment devices are sold locally by Curries, which has high hopes for the range alongside its agency for HP Indigos. The technology was a clear winner at Drupa, where Scodix handed out a mind-blowing 250,000 printed samples to more than 30,000 visitors to its booth. Scodix recently enlarged the format of its biggest machine, the S75.

Renz Australia offers a new process from its GMP stable – Digital Sleeking. This modulation of spot varnishing involves a laminator producing a spot varnish effect in gloss, matt, holographic or metallic. Renz director Rod Fowler says it costs a fraction of spot varnishing, making it viable for short runs.

Digital press manufacturer MGI – represented in Australia by Ferrostaal – reports that its new JetVarnish 3D spot UV coater eliminates the trade-off of speed over coating thickness. The coater, first seen at Drupa, can handle production UV coating speeds while offering enhanced thicknesses without a brake on output. There’s also 3D spot embossing that can vary in thickness for different applications.

Ferrostaal also has the Bagel DigiFav laminator, which laminates digital jobs up to B2 vertical (50x70mm). Rayne Simpson, Ferrostaal’s general manager of printing & finishing, says using standalone enhancement equipment offline means sites with multiple digital presses can share a machine.

A DigiFav laminator was installed at Colemans Printing in the Northern Territory, a sheetfed printer with Heidelbergs at its facilities in Darwin and Alice Springs. The 61-year-old company also has a digital offer courtesy of its pair of HP Indigos. Production manager Andrew Hodge oversees an array of offline digital finishing kit supplied by Ferrostaal to add specialties to Indigo output. Alongside the DigiFav, there’s a Morgana CardXtra business card cutter and a Morgana DigiFold Pro high-speed creaser-folder.

Shane Wildash, managing director of Artvue Printing, is another DigiFav user. The boutique Sydney provider offers specialty printing, and added a DigiFav late last year to enhance a growing number of digital orders.

While he is a fan on inline, on-press embellishment, Theo Pettaras from Digitalpress says there are jobs where quality, volume or time limits demand a more traditional approach. “We have a laminating machine and digital foiling machine, both great features to have in-house,” says Pettaras, but he adds the rider, “these machines require staff to operate”.

Human hands make a difference to margins, and he cautions that deciding to embellish in-house has to be weighed carefully.

Expert opinion: meet the masters

Onboard embellishing on digital presses: does it make your local finishing-bindery trade guy want to give it all up? Not at all. One-pass specialties will thin the traffic flow to the aficionados, but while there is a place for green-button embellishing via a box in the corner of a printer’s bindery, when it really comes to adding sizzle, there’s no alternative to the experts.

Alan Fawcett, managing director of Sydney finisher Watermarx, says: “When, for example, you have a small machine that puts down a black image and then laminates, if you’re happy with that quality, then great. It’s just what people are prepared to pay for. But you do have limitations with the stocks you can use.”

Fawcett says the limitations of one-pass enhancement means customers will seek out the maestros next time. “If you want a proper emboss or you want to use all different colours of foils, you have to go back to the way it’s being done now.”

He cautions that inline specialties may go well – until the first hazard, “for example, if you get a spot that’s a little tricky, or some foil that doesn’t work”.

While his training has been in offset, Fawcett says the premium embellishment houses are using digital-only processes in a counter-offensive to the press vendors. “For example, you now have cold foil inline laminating added as the first layer of the sheet. The image goes on under pressure and the glue takes the foil off the roll and then there’s a four-colour build done on top of it. Some of the results are stunning.”

Avon Graphics managing director Trevor Hone sees a continuing need for specialist digital embellishing. “There’s a new, or perhaps a changing, market where short-run digital with embellishment is a requirement and we’re fitting into that. Quite often, digital printers don’t want to invest in a large, costly piece of equipment just to do a few embellishments on a few jobs – we gather up quite a few of those jobs from a lot of digital printers.”

Hone says many digital print clients are looking for new effects on digital print that were implausible a few years ago, in foiling, laminating and UV coating, all of it in runs down to 100, an equation that would not be feasible in offset.

“Not many digital presses have these capabilities but that might change,” he says. “But it’s still a question of whether a printer will invest that kind of money for what will be a small part of their overall workflow.”

Although the Avon boss did not divulge details, he said many of the embellishing machines at the 38-year-old specialty company’s Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane facilities are capable of litho and digital applications, and a small component is digital-only.

Being mindful of digital’s pitfalls is a specialist’s challenge. Toner-printed jobs are prone to cracking and digital papers generally are sensitive to curl from heat transfer. These present adherence issues for foil stamping and laminating unless handled properly. “We have to use different foils, laminates and adhesives,” says Hone. Inkjet is less of a problem than toner, he finds.

When ProPrint speaks to Hone, his team is working with an unnamed vendor on a demonstration for PacPrint, using high-build spot-UV varnish, spot coating, foil stamping and embellishments on toner-printed stock, to show what can be achieved in digital.

Allkotes business development director Darren Delaney says the company has been working in the digital realm for some time and is happy with its progress. “Short runs, some of which you can count on one hand, together with different Ink types and substrates, take a lot of testing
and development and we believe we have come a long way.”

Delaney concurs that bringing digital embellishing in-house is not every print provider’s ideal scenario. “To some it is a headache because the technology is not as advanced as the digital printing.”

Collaboration with printers on highly specialised boards is one area that is likely to remain future-proofed from the smarts of a versatile digital production press. For example, Allkotes has been working with digital printers in developing substrates for metallised board stocks that can be digitally printed to give the effect of embellish-ment. Can your press vendor offer that?

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