Toray Graphics, a leading manufacturer of offset plate technologies, announced the development of a breakthrough dry offset printing plate designed to deliver exceptionally photorealistic imagery in two-piece beverage can printing.
The newly developed Prixia plate builds on Toray’s extensive expertise and track record in printing plate production using silicon rubber, one of the company’s core technologies for printing materials. Prixia delivers a printing quality of up to 250 lines per inch, compared to a resolution of 75 to 120 lines per inch for common photopolymer plates.
Toray’s Prixia plate delivers higher image quality
In developing this innovative plate solution, Toray sought input from several industry constituents about the value of the highly improved quality delivered by Prixia. These ranged from consumers to designers and talent agencies, and the company reports that all were highly impressed with what they saw.
The consensus from these discussions was the higher image quality delivered by Prixia would have excellent shelf appeal. And importantly, it enables the use of celebrity images on beverage cans that do not compromise their images and makes it easier to gain approval for the use of their likenesses, another factor that will contribute to excellent shelf appeal for these products.
Designers also commented that having such high image quality ensures the final product closely resembles mock-ups, which speeds approval processes and makes pre-launch favorability rating surveys conducted with mock-ups easier to analyze more accurately.
The ability to deliver an unheard of 250-line-per-inch quality is driven by the fact that Prixia thermal CTP plates have an individual dot size of 7 microns, compared to 50 microns for polymer plates, and there is virtually no dot gain. Plate life is estimated to be approximately one million cans. Toray’s Prixia will be commercially available worldwide in August of 2021.
