THOMAS & KURZBERG GMBH – FLEX PACK
Halftone proofs on all printing substrates – FLEX PACK system for package printing
A long-established traditional company, Thomas & Kurzberg GmbH offers purely prepress services. Its portfolio ranges from design to plate production and mock-ups for customers producing folding cartons, flexible packaging, cup and bucket printing. The team of 15 employees looks after international top brands as well as local package printing companies. This requires a high degree of professionalism and know-how. Initially, the various press curves from partners and customers had to be loaded into FLEX PACK in order to achieve absolute color accuracy.
Additionally, it was necessary to create profiles for the many different original media and substrates that are supplied by customers and on which the final print is to be done. Especially impressive is the iterative CGS ORIS 4D-color management and the software’s ability to precisely reproduce typical dot gains and the original screening. Thanks to the special XG Inks where Light Magenta and Light Cyan have been replaced with orange and green, FLEX PACK offers a color gamut that fulfills all the requirements of offset and flexographic package printing. “Our team has extensive knowledge of color management and profiling”, states Uwe Strauss, IT Administrator at T&K. “Therefore, the transition to the FLEX PACK system was quite easy and a day of training was enough to familiarize ourselves generally with the program.”
“Our halftone proofs are always a hundred percent color accurate, even when reproducing spot colors. This is a prerequisite for our customers.” –
Jochen Heibrock, Managing Director, THOMAS & KURZBERG GMBH
Arguments for implementing the CGS ORIS solution:
We have decided for CGS ORIS and FLEX PACK because it is extremely important for us and our customers to be able to print on all substrates and at the same time ensure color accuracy, screen ruling and dot gain as well as preserving the tactile look & feel”, explains Jochen Heibrock.
“Another advantage is the handling of customers’ spot and Pantone colors that are centrally kept in a color management library. Alternatively, the Esko color library can be accessed. Handling of the software and the Roland printer is easy and intuitive. This was a key point in our investment decision.
By now, all customer print profiles and workflows are created in our system enabling us to deliver color-accurate halftone proofs by the push of a button. Especially in film printing, where nearly always partial white under- or overprinting is used, it is extremely important that those complex print requirements can be perfectly reproduced. In the past, particularly original substrates were a challenge for our Cromalin proofing system and extraordinary time consuming. This can now be comfortably and rapidly accomplished with the FLEX PACK system.”
“This is true for all CGS ORIS media, especially the new transfer film which works perfectly on heat-sensitive PE films. The film is only a few μ thick, color-neutral and therefore almost completely invisible. In addition, it has a wide color gamut, and after printing, can be transferred onto PE films, composite materials and other print media, using a standard laminator. A post-process with a so-called embossing film can then add different surface gloss grades and spot varnish effects. When it comes to the diversity of substrates to be proofed, particularly transparent films, the FLEX PACK system provides unique opportunities that no other system can provide”, states Uwe Strauss.
“We provide an extremely broad spectrum of services, ranging from frozen food bags to folding cartons, and all of these can be reproduced extremely well with FLEX PACK, which enables us to produce more varieties of mock-ups for our clients. Although we still occasionally run jobs on our offset proofing press, it cannot keep pace with the FLEX PACK proofing solution in terms of the time it takes to create a proof. In addition, the FLEX PACK system is extremely cost effective.”