Flagship Press expands with Screen high-speed inkjet

Jul 1, 2008 2:01 PM

Flagship Press, Inc. (North Andover, MA) has purchased the Screen (Rolling Meadows, IL) Truepress Jet520 roll-fed inkjet press designed to print full-color images and text using variable data. The purchase is aimed at improving its competitiveness in the production of short-run, custom color publications.

Since its founding in 1950, the company has grown through targeted acquisitions of equipment and assets. Today, Flagship Press occupies 85,000 sq. ft. and has 130 employees. Annual sales currently exceed $20 million.

"The Truepress Jet520 offers faster printing speeds and the capacity to produce significantly higher volumes at a lower cost than our current lineup of digital printing devices," says vice president Christopher Poor.

The press prints on inkjet paper, standard paper and uncoated stock up to 20.5 inches wide. It can print 210 fpm, the equivalent of 55,000 iph, and features a maximum imaging resolution of 720 x 720 dpi.

The Jet520 complements the firm's two-color through eight-color offset presses. A six-color, 28-inch Mitsubishi plus coater is accompanied by five 40-inch models, including three perfectors (a two-color Heidelberg, a two-color Komori and a six-color Mitsubishi with an aqueous coating unit) and two straight presses (a six-color Mitsubishi with aqueous coater and an eight-color Komori with both offset and hybrid UV capabilities).

Two Xerox iGen3 digital color production presses and three Xerox DocuTech 6180 monochrome printers round out the company's digital print stable. The digital printing department produces software documentation textbooks and manuals on demand, along with prototypes, samples, short-run color covers and variable data mail pieces.

"When we began researching inkjet technology, our first reaction was, 'Will the printing be of commercially acceptable quality?'" Poor recalls. "In comparing inkjet to toner-based printing, we came away extremely impressed by how far inkjet has evolved in terms of quality, speed and reliability."

Flagship Press' Truepress Jet520 is configured as a dual-engine duplex model, enabling the press to print both sides of the web roll in one pass. Flagship Press outfitted the press with a Standard Hunkeler Gen6 paper handling system for high-performance unwinding, consistent web tension, rotary cutting, perfing, web merging and precision stacking. The double-cut capability allows full-bleed trimming across and inline with the web. Perfectly stacked book blocks with edge-to-edge color exit the system ready for downstream processing. Inline folding capabilities will be added later in 2008.

http://www.screenusa.com