Tag Archives: Benny Landa

Nanography™ at the 2016 Drupa international trade show

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Drupa is the largest printing equipment trade show and exhibition in the world (Wikipedia essay) and the 2016 edition is being held from May 31 – June 10, 2016 in Dusseldorf, Germany. As he did in 2012 (see my May 18, 2012 post), Benny Landa (a legendary figure in the printing equipment industry) is presenting nanotechnology-enabled printing presses. I gather 2012 featured a ‘concept’ presentation, which included the introduction of a new ink (NanoInk™) and this 2016 presentation will feature a working press. A May 6, 2016 article by Naomi Webb for Tech Guru Daily describes Landa’s position in the industry and his new presses (Note: The writer does not seem very familiar with nanotechnology),

One thing is certain about the upcoming Drupa show in Dusseldorf: you can expect a high level of excitement around Landa. The firm is the brainchild of Benny Landa – the ‘father of digital printing’ and a man described as the print industry’s Steve Jobs by Print Week. …

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As Landa himself told Print Week: “The crucial difference is that all processes where wet ink contacts paper suffer from the same problems. Water wicks along the paper fibres and it’s very, very difficult to dry it with so much water in the paper. Therefore, inkjet is limited. It’s either high-speed or high area coverage, but not both.

“The fact that there is no ink-paper interaction is the fundamental difference with Nanography [printing concept/technology]. No matter what you transfer to you get an identical image.” …

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It [Landa Company] will put on five 30-minute theatre presentations a day and arcade to showcase its inventions, with demonstrations to run on the S10, S10P and W10 Nanographic Printing Presses. On top of that, the Landa L50 Nano-Metallography Module will be used to print metallized labels on a conventional narrow web press.

I wonder if these new products are open systems. Landa’s last company featured equipment (Indigo) with a proprietary or closed system (meaning that if a printer had one piece of Indigo equipment, every other connecting piece also had to be an Indigo product).

Benny Landa and nanoprinting

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There’s one more announcement from DRUPA (the 2012 edition of the International Trade Fair for prepress, premedia, printing, book binding, print finishing and paper converting held May 3 – 16, 2012) that I want to feature here, especially since it’s nanotechnology-related.  From the May 17, 2012 news item on Nanowerk,

Landa Corporation announced the details of its groundbreaking Landa Nanographic Printing™ Presses that are set to transform mainstream commercial, packaging and publishing markets. With output speeds comparable to offset presses and employing NanoInk™ colorants that create unprecedented image qualities, the Landa Nanographic Printing™ Press portfolio is set to fundamentally change printing as we know it.

Landa Founder, Chairman and CEO Benny Landa says, “Nanography™ is a new technology for applying ink to paper. In developing Landa Nanographic Printing we had to re-think and reinvent the printing press. The result is digital printing with remarkable performance – from a family of presses that share stunning ergonomic design, a small footprint and some of the most advanced user functionality available in the market.”

There is very little technical detail which is typical of Landa’s approach. As I recall from my days working for a competitor, Indigo, Landa’s last printing company, sold presses built on proprietary software. Any printer who purchased Indigo products was locked into the ‘Indigo world’ as there was no possibility of mixing and matching products from other manufacturers.

On that note, I notice this reference to a propriety ink in Landa’s latest product announcement (May 17, 2012 news item),

At the heart of the Nanographic Printing™ process are Landa NanoInk™ colorants. Comprised of pigment particles only tens of nanometres in size (1 nanometer is about 100,000 times thinner than a human hair), these nano-pigments are extremely powerful absorbers of light and enable unprecedented image qualities. Landa Nanographic Printing is characterised by ultra-sharp dots of extremely high uniformity, high gloss fidelity and the broadest colour gamut of any four-colour printing process.

Nanographic Printing begins with the ejection of billions of microscopic droplets of water-based Landa NanoInk onto a heated blanket conveyor belt. Each droplet of aqueous NanoInk lands at a precise location on the belt, creating the colour image. As the water evaporates, the ink becomes an ultra-thin dry polymeric film, less than half the thickness of offset images.

The resulting image is then transferred to any kind of ordinary paper, coated or uncoated, or onto any plastic packaging film – without requiring pre-treatment. The NanoInk film image instantaneously bonds to the surface, forming a tough, abrasion-resistant laminated layer without leaving any residual ink on the blanket.

Since NanoInk images are already dry, there is no need for post drying. Two-sided printing becomes simple and printed goods can be immediately handled, right off the press, even in the most aggressive finishing equipment.

Given that the printing industry is not experiencing growth these days, it’ll be interesting to see if this ‘nano’ approach is going to work. My last posting about the 2012 DRUPA focused on 3-D printing and paper loudspeakers (May 4, 2012).