At the beginning of October, the packaging print shop Warneke Paper Box invited more than 60 visitors from the USA, Canada and Mexico to Denver for an open house, where it showcased the new Primefire 106 and its impressive capabilities. Warneke’s Primefire is the first digital printing system in B1 format in the USA and worldwide is the first standard-production machine delivered by Heidelberger Druckmaschinen AG (Heidelberg) in July this year. The Primefire prints top quality with a resolution of 1200 x 1200 dpi, and boasts a wide colour gamut and stable colour consistency.
“The print quality of the Primefire 106 is unlike anything else I’ve seen, and satisfies all my criteria for a digital platform,” confirms Stacy Warneke, President and CEO of Warneke. Steve Huppert, Vice President and COO of Warneke added: “We can also migrate everything we’ve printed so far on our Heidelberg offset presses to the Primefire 106. The new digital business models, customizations, and personalizations enable us to generate added value for our customers, and we expect that the Primefire will account for 25 percent of our sales volume in the future.”
Visitors at the open house were also amazed by the Primefire’s capabilities. “To be honest, I went to this event thinking I was going to see the same inkjet technology that I’ve seen from other manufacturers before, but the Primefire 106 really exceeded my expectations,” said Karim Angel, Owner and Managing Director of Dataprint in Mexico City. “Wow! I have never seen anything like it – the inline varnish, the handling of substrates with cartons up to 24 points – everything about the machine really impressed me. The full sheet format of 70 x 100 cm convinced me that the Primefire really is the best digital press developed so far.”
Heidelberg launched the Primefire 106 at drupa 2016, and brought this machine to series-production readiness in a record time of just two and a half years. In Europe, three customers from the packaging and pharmaceutical are beta testing the press. The demand is especially high in the American, European, and Chinese markets. Production at the Wiesloch-Walldorf site is at capacity for the next two years. “We listened to our customers when they told us what they needed. This includes producing ever declining runs economically and meeting ever stricter regulations in packaging printing with counterfeit-proof packaging design,” explained Montserrat Peidro-Insa, Head of Digital at Heidelberg at the event. “With the Primefire 106, we can inspire our customers to try new business opportunities by making the production of unique packaging profitable, and enabling security features, connected packaging solutions, personalized designs, and faster product prototyping, among others. We have delivered and the machine is in high demand worldwide.”
The Primefire 106 is the recipient of the prestigious 2018 Intertech Technology Award. “I’ve been evaluating digital printing presses for many years, and up until now, no machine has even come close to meeting all of the necessary key requirements to be considered a viable production solution in folding carton packaging,” said Trish Alberico of General Converting in Bolingbrook, Illinois. “In order to justify adding a digital press, the press must fit within our current production stream and be capable of supporting the next challenge a customer may bring. After seeing the Primefire, it´s obvious that Heidelberg engineered this press to change the game.”
