Attendees at the Koenig & Bauer 200th anniversary celebrations in Wurzburg last month saw a wide range of the company’s products and its attempt to define its future. While the company is fairly resigned to the global decline in the high volume web newspaper and commercial printing market and is looking to increase its service offerings in that segment, it is making significant investments in the development of inkjet systems both for industrial and commercial printing. While for corrugated printing it is partnering HP, for its wide web commercial inkjet press it is going on its own with the development of the RotaJET L Series, which it first showed at drupa 2016, and a RotaJET 130, which was ordered by Finnish book printer Bookwell Digital Oy.
On view at the 200th anniversary celebrations were the modular design of the RotaJET L with the new Koenig & Bauer logo where it was printing commercial work including posters of the Wurzburg born NBA basketball star Dirk Nowitzki. With the RotaJET L Series with web widths from 77 to 138 cm, Koenig & Bauer is building what it claims is one of the most future-proof high-volume inkjet printing platforms or systems in the market for a variety of application segments in commercial, publication, packaging, advertising and functional printing. It is clear from the visit to the Wurzburg plant that the company still sees itself as a supplier of digital heavy metal, that is, even with digital it is looking at itself as an engineering supplier and integrator of larger and wider high-volume inkjet systems.
The RotaJet series uses RotaColor polymer inks and what it says are the latest print-head technologies together with intelligent low-energy dryers that work at low temperatures for good lay-flat properties for book printing. The scalable XLO imaging workflow is based on Adobe’s APPE architecture.
