HOW'D WE PRINT THIS?: Pioneering Coverage on Uncoated

Printing on recycled, uncoated stock can have a dramatic visual and tactile effect—and be eco-friendly—as evidenced by our front cover. The 65-lb. Mohawk Options premium cover-weight sheet is 100% post-consumer waste (PCW) fiber with improved opacity and ink holdout for crisp dot definition. It’s also manufactured with Green-e certified, renewable, non-polluting, wind-generated electricity.

The project was printed 200-lpi and grain long on 23×35´´ sheets using new Toyo Ink expanded-gamut, zero-VOC UV Kaleido Inks at Lake County Press (LCP), north of Chicago. It ran sheetwise and three-up on the firm’s 8-color 40´´ Heidelberg Speedmaster CD 102 with interdeck UV curing from IST.

LCP, a $53-million sheetfed/digital shop (#89 on the GAM 101), was one of the first commercial printers in the Midwest to earn certification from the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), completing the Rainforest Alliance process more than two years ago.

For this 78,000-run cover job, a combination of Nicoat UV coating and DuPont Cyrel flexo plates on the press’s ninth unit achieved the raised, textured effect over the droplet images on the water lilies. The spot UV was applied inline, after the process UV inks cured instantly.

Brought in specially for this on-press experiment, Heidelberg supplied an anilox roller with an “incredibly deep etch,” says Mark Wagner, LCP customer service manager, to meter the amount of coating being applied.

The Toyo King (TK) Hy-Unity Kaleido Ink line employs newly developed pigments that are redefining 4-color printing by expanding the CMYK gamut to nearly the full Adobe RGB gamut seen on computer monitors—rendering the equivalent of 6- or 7-color process printing, says Toyo.

Extending these pigments to UV caps a year of innovation for the ink manufacturer, which is celebrating its 100th anniversary. The UV ink set is just now being released, following the successful U.S. introduction of the soy-based, sheetfed version 15 months ago.

Yellow, magenta and cyan all feature the improved transparency of Kaleido Ink’s hi-def hues, improving the chromogenic properties of secondary and tertiary colors. Vivid magenta and pink reproduction (see flower) are other benefits, as are dense blues, enhanced reds and smooth gradations from yellow to red. Excellent gloss is achieved by applying enhanced pigment dispersion technology and using highly soluble resins.

The new ink even has its own ICC color profile. Because tones are more transparent, they offer less visual density. A colorimeter and densitometer can ensure required density for the wide gamut—up to 1.2 times higher than standard printing.

Because UV Kaleido Inks are so vibrant, the printer adjusted for dot gain and color balance by applying special curves to its plates, Wagner reports.

Conventional sheetfed Kaleido Inks were featured in Toyo Ink’s Benny-winning calendar (see GAM September 2007, p.98). View online photos of the firm’s elaborate Benny display at October’s IGAS show in Tokyo: graphicartsonline.com.