The label and packaging market is on the march again. Consumer restraint has led to reduced sales and, at the same time, increased the pressure on brand name manufacturers. This development has to be taken into consideration. Customers are more inclined to buy products off the shelf if labels are of a higher quality and the effects used on them are more and more elaborate.

Higher quality labels go hand-in-hand with higher manufacturing costs in the printing plant. It is not feasible to hand these increased manufacturing costs on down the chain. Consequently, printing houses find their margins coming under pressure.

How is it possible to get out of this dilemma? This was the subject of a recent Open House in Maulburg. On the occasion of its 40th anniversary, Dr. Jürgen Dillmann made it clear that Muller Martini offers its traditional clientele machines with which it is possible to act very successfully in traditional areas of business. The recently developed Alprinta variable size web press has provided a springboard for Muller Martini to enter additional markets and applications.

This press is available in two widths (520 and 740 mm). As standard, Muller Martini supplies cassettes in well known sizes with the machine. To complement to these, Muller Martini presented a fully variable size printing insert at the Open House. These cassettes, designed as non-heatset inserts, include a plate cylinder, blanket cylinder and a backup cylinder. When the product size is changed over, the cassette stays in the machine and only the actual parts affecting size are changed, namely the blanket cylinder and the plate cylinder.

Changeover requires no tools. The lightweight, yet extremely stable formatting parts are consistently matched to the requirements of the offset process and are therefore an improvement on designs known up to now. This difference in design is the reason that the high quality of the Alprinta inking system can also be transferred to the substrate.

At its Open House, Muller Martini showed label production on OPP roll-fed stock and demonstrated a change of job and product size to the customers on a demo machine. The show visitors were clearly very impressed by the setup times on the press and the quality of the labels printed. In this way it was possible to confirm what Dr. Jürgen Dillmann meant at the beginning of the event when he said, "With our demonstrations we want to stimulate ideas for new areas of business and we are convinced that the market for flexible packaging and to an extent for label production are going to be of interest to Alprinta operators."

Nowadays, label printers use flexographic, gravure and to a great extent web offset printing presses. Current label requirements, which to a certain extent result from the packaging regulations, are forcing various areas of business over to web printing. Single material containers made of plastic necessitate the use of web presses. Filling plants are working increasingly with roll-fed labels. These days, labels are mainly printed on flexographic presses.

With the Alprinta, Muller Martini is offering a press where the product size can be changed very quickly and easily, and which is capable of achieving production speeds of up to 450 m/min. The strength of this concept lies in its flexibility and the cost advantage of offset plates compared with the costs involved with flexo printing plates.

The quality of flexo printing is clearly surpassed. The modular design of this machine means it is possible to build on extra offset towers, with a possible total of 12. As with previous designs, the Alprinta of course also supports hybrid applications of flexo and offset printing in a single press. Muller Martini committed to UV technology very early on and can now look back on over 20 years' experience.

Muller Martini sees variable size offset technology as a complement to well-known press designs. As well as the advantages already mentioned, the technology is much more flexible than gravure. Muller Martini expects even more progress in the development of printing inks that will lead to increasingly more orders that currently have to be produced in gravure being capable of being printed in UV offset. Muller Martini is convinced that new quality standards relating to offset printing will establish themselves which will then be insisted upon by the big brand name manufacturers.

A clearly visible shift in the drinks sector is already very well advanced. Traditional returnable bottles and cans used up to now are being replaced by PET bottles. Marketing departments are trying to attract interest to their particular products with more and more conspicuous shapes. Labels must then follow suit. Wrap-around or shrink sleeve labels produced by reverse printing are typical. Recycling considerations and the cost advantage offered by plastic materials are motivating a shift from sheet-fed presses to web presses.

Opportunities
Muller Martini sees in this technology a great opportunity for accessing new sectors of business. The open modularity of the presses with their highly developed electronic control systems offers CIP3/CIP4 functionality. Needless to say, these presses are also capable of being integrated into the respective EDP system of the printing house and can therefore be linked directly with prepress operations.

Muller Martini sees considerably more potential in the setup process and start-up waste areas. This new printing press technology, further developments in the field of printing chemicals and the requirements of commercial chains will lead to new types of production, squeezing out concepts that are in existence today.