PRIXIA: TORAY’S DRY PLATE MARKS A NEW ERA IN BEVERAGE CAN PRINTING
Plate technology manufacturer Toray Graphics has announced the development of an innovative dry offset printing plate designed to deliver exceptionally photorealistic images in the printing of two-piece beverage cans.
The newly developed plate, called Prixia, builds on Toray’s expertise in the production of printing plates using silicone rubber, one of the company’s core technologies for printing materials.
This new dry printing system also allows the use of celebrity images on beverage cans that do not compromise their images and makes it easier to obtain approval for the use of their images, another factor that will contribute to excellent shelf appeal in supermarkets and department stores.
In developing this innovative plate solution, Toray Graphics sensed the interest of the industries involved in the new format. These ranged from consumers to designers to talent agencies. The conclusion was unanimous, the project would have a great appeal on the shelves of large supermarkets.
The designers also commented that having such high image quality ensures that the final product closely resembles the mock-ups, which speeds up approval processes and makes pre-launch favorability rating surveys conducted with mock-ups easier to analyze more accurately.
With Prixia, the manufacturer Toray Graphics offers a print quality of up to 250 lines per inch, compared to a resolution of 75 to 120 lines per inch for common photopolymer plates.
The ability to deliver this “unprecedented” quality of 250 lines per inch is driven by the fact that Prixia’s CTP thermal plates have an individual dot size of seven microns, compared to 50 microns for polymer plates. It is estimated that the lifetime of the plate is approximately one million cans. Toray Graphics has announced that the international marketing of these thermal plates began last August.
