The Flint Group has announced a new thermal flat top dot plate, Nyloflex XFH Digital, specifically aimed at wide web flexible packaging printers.
The XFH Digital plate offers a unique texturized surface that can produce beautiful, dense solids on flexible packaging and can be imaged at high speed at any resolution without requiring the use of surface screening. This surface aids good ink transfer, which helps to reduce pinholing, and leads to uniform vignettes with soft highlight fades as well as even tones.
P.J. Fronczkiewicz, product manager for Flint Group Flexographic, says that this plate benefits from Flint’s anti-ink fill (AIF) technology, adding: “As a result, the plates stay much cleaner during printing, reducing stops and increasing press uptime, and they have outstanding solvent resistance which improves color consistency over long runs. The superior resistance to solvent makes the plates more durable, which also contributes to our customers’ sustainability efforts since they are able to reuse the plates in many instances – so it’s a win-win option for them.”
This plate can be exposed using any standard flexo plate exposure unit and imaged with any laser system suitable for imaging flexo printing plates. Being a thermal plate, the XFH is designed for use with Flint’s Nyloflex Xpress thermal processor. This eliminates all solvent handling and plate drying time so that it should be possible to image and finish the plates ready for press in under one hour. Flint says that there’s no need for any other consumable items or software to attain the flat top dot structure and texture on the plate.
This new plate follows on from the XVH Digital plate that Flint launched towards the end of last year, also promising flat top dots, but designed for narrow web presses. At the time, Flint promised to launch a second thermal flat top dot plate, which it has made good on with this announcement
The XFH Digital plate is available in 1.14 mm and 1.70 mm standard thicknesses and in 900 x 1200 mm, 1067 x 1524 mm and 1270 x 2032 mm sizes. You can find further information from flintgrp.com.
Leave a Reply