The Gallus Labelfire 340 featured among this year’s Intertech Award recipients. Along with its Heidelberg stablemate, the Prinect Press Centre XL 2.
Released at last year’s drupa, the Gallus Labelfire and Prinect Press Centre target label production and offset printing respectively. Ulrich Hermann, a member of the management board responsible for digital business and services at Heidelberg, says, “The InterTech Awards are an important acknowledgment underlining Heidelberg’s leading position in both digital printing technology as well as the digitization of the entire print shop operation.”
Heidelberg says the the InterTech jury saw the Prinect Press Center XL 2 with Wallscreen XL and Intellistart 2 software as representing a breakthrough in terms of the digitisation of offset print production. It adds that the Gallus Labelfire helped introduce industrialised digital print production into the label market, one of the industry’s biggest growth segments.
The Prinect Press Center XL 2 enables the press to execute consecutive job changes fully autonomously without any operator intervention. The Intellistart 2 combines data analytics, mechanical design and intelligent software, including colour measurement systems that define and execute the fastest changeover sequence possible. The automatic processes are parallelised, optimised and autonomously completed in the ideal sequence. Jim Workman, vice president of Printing Industries of America’s Center for Research and Technology, says, “The judges were unanimous in their conviction that this level of autonomous operation signals a brave new future in print manufacturing.”
The company says the Gallus Labelfire enables label printers to varnish, embellish and further process labels inline – from the roll to the finished die-cut label in a single production operation. Workman says, “The press innovatively combines inkjet printing, flexo printing, embellishing, and converting; the judges could see the impact of a press that can do it all in a single pass.”
Printing Industries of America first presented the InterTech Technology Award in 1978. Each year, the association recognises print media innovations in a variety of categories. Heidelberg has received over 35 of all the awards presented over the years for various prepress, press, and postpress technologies.
