Nussbaum Matzingen AG has switched over its print form manufacturing activities for cans and tubes from conventional film originals to direct CtP imagesetting. All letterpress plates are now imaged using a Lüscher MultiDX! in a process that gives Nussbaum higher quality and better cost efficiency.
Nussbaum, which has its headquarters in Matzingen (Switzerland), is one of Europe‘s leading suppliers of a range of aluminium monoblock packaging products. Nussbaum specializes in the development, production and marketing of high-quality aluminium cans and tubes. At its sites in Matzingen and Kesswil in Switzerland, as well as its German sites located in Frankenberg and Rielasingen, the company produces approximately 380 million cans and 100 million tubes every year. Nussbaum‘s strength lies in the high quality of its manufactured products and the wide range of cans and tubes it supplies.
The demanding requirements of can printing
There are only a very few companies that are able to print up to eight colours on aluminium cans using a complex process based on letterpress printing. The challenge lies in transferring motifs that are designed by the customers themselves to the curved surface of an aluminium can undistorted and with no loss of colour fidelity. The can is printed in a single step using the indirect dry offset “wet-in-wet“ method. Up to the change of technology, the letterpress plates were produced CtF on the basis of film originals. However, because it was becoming increasingly difficult to find imagesetters and in response to rising film prices, Nussbaum decided to switch to the direct CtP imaging of the letterpress plates. During an evaluation phase, Nussbaum carefully examined and tested the CtP systems available on the market. One important criterion was that the use of CtP instead of film should not make any difference to the printed product. The Lüscher MultiDX! was the only system to achieve the same results as film straight away without any changes to the calibration. What is more, the MultiDX! produced the sharpest edges on the test forms with a true resolution of 2‘540 dpi. It was these outstanding test results that persuaded Nussbaum to choose the Lüscher MultiDX!. Daniel Isenring, Prepress Manager at Nussbaum, explains: “The things that impressed us about the MultiDX! were the very high image quality, the system‘s ease of use and the price/ performance ratio.“ The company‘s Matzingen site images the entire range of letterpress plates for all the production plants in Switzerland. Taken overall, the introduction of the MultiDX! is a success story that has helped Nussbaum achieve top-quality performance.
