Bringing Flexo Into the Fold

One person examining flexo's potential is Dennis Pratt, materials manager at Menasha in Neenah, WI. He's currently conducting a cost analysis comparison of flexo, sheetfed offset and web offset to determine if flexo is viable for Menasha's SBS and clay-coated folding carton work.

A cornerstone of Pratt's investigation will be establishing a clearer definition of printing "quality," a word which he says is too often used with adjectives, not numbers. As examples of vague quality claims, Pratt points to "common folklore" about flexo: statements such as "it doesn't print as many dpi as offset" and "it doesn't perform as well on vignettes" that don't mention specific substrates. Pratt wants instead "to take press limitations to where they meet the substrate." If a flexo/offset quality equivalent on a certain substrate can be found, it eliminates cost-quality tradeoffs, he says.