Printing for Corrugated Packaging: What's Ahead for Color Digital Printing?

Given the large part that flexo plays in printing corrugated, our survey asked about the role of companies and products that support the digital imaging of flexo plates. Most the companies (23 out of 30, or 77 percent) do not use digital imaging for flexo plate creation. Of these non-users, we asked whether they were aware of four of the best known suppliers—DuPont, Esko, Kodak, and MacDermid—and 48 percent were not aware of any of them (DuPont was the best known, but still with only 17 percent awareness). In a similar question, we asked if the managers were aware of several of the most modern "direct engraving" systems for the digital creation of flexo plates. As seen in the Figure 4, 67 percent had no awareness at all. InfoTrends' judgment is that vendors of such systems need to do more to educate the corrugated printing market that flexo serves so well, because digital imaging of flexo plates can also help make the printing and decoration of corrugated more efficient.