HP Indigo WS6000 Digital Press

HP announced commercial availability of a high-volume digital press that helps consumer packaged goods makers, product marketers and other product brand owners increase their marketing effectiveness and reduce costs and environmental impact across their product label supply chains.

The new HP Indigo WS6000 Digital Press’s combination of speed, size format and streamlined digital workflow offers distinct advantages over conventional analog printing of labels, shrink sleeves and other packaging materials.

The high-volume, high-quality digital press helps brand owners make their manufacturing supply chains more cost-effective by significantly reducing time to market and waste from obsolescence. In addition, label and packaging converter businesses that serve brand owners can reduce make-ready waste while offering enhanced efficiency to their customers by moving production to a just-in-time environment that diminishes warehousing and inventory needs.

“HP is unlocking lean manufacturing benefits for consumer packaged goods makers in addition to offering a competitive cost per label,” said Alon Bar-Shany, vice president and general manager, Indigo division, HP. “Building on the success of the market-leading digital label press, the HP Indigo ws4500, the new WS6000 model offers a combination of quality, fast turnaround and flexibility that will enable our customers to pursue new revenue opportunities.”

The HP Indigo WS6000 Digital Press prints at 98 feet per minute (30 meters per minute) in four-color mode, and is compatible with a broad range of media – from thinner flexible packaging substrates, to label and shrink sleeve media, to folding carton material. The press is designed to be more cost-effective than the traditional flexographic printing process used in label and packaging production for jobs up to 13,000 linear feet (4,000 linear meters), a figure that represents approximately 80 percent of label jobs.

“Over the past few years, digital printing has fast become a new mainstream printing process for short-run, profitable label production. With the introduction of the new HP Indigo WS6000, digital printing is moving to a higher profitability, medium-run, high-performance industrial label press operation,” said analyst Mike Fairley, director of strategic development for Tarsus Expositions and Publishing’s Label Group. “The WS6000 would seem to be a converters’ ideal production solution in today’s cost-competitive world.”

Label converters now installing the HP Indigo WS6000 are experiencing new production opportunities to transition manufacturing from traditional flexography to digital for greater efficiencies. HP Indigo presses are the only digital label and packaging solutions that use true PANTONE-licensed spot-color inks, and they are the only digital label and packaging presses offering four-, six- and seven-color PANTONE-licensed spot color emulation, giving converters the ability to meet their customers’ demanding brand color standards.

HP Indigo presses, which are already widely used in the label converting industry, meet or exceed brand owners’ stringent quality needs. In the past two years, labels printed on HP Indigo presses have earned best-in-show honors in industry quality competitions that also judged entries printed on flexographic and offset presses. With the proven quality and higher productivity now offered, converters’ capabilities with the new HP Indigo WS6000 are drawing increased attention from leading consumer packaged goods firms.

“The HP Indigo WS6000 is a real ‘game changing’ technology. With frequent artwork changes and high SKU complexity, this digital technology can dramatically reduce the speed to market for labels and other printed packaging materials,” said Michael Ferrari, associate director, Corporate Research and Development, The Procter & Gamble Company. “As more label and packaging converting work goes digital, companies like P&G can enhance the consumer experience by efficiently bringing a greater variety of designs to store shelves, ensuring that more consumers are aware of a given product’s benefits and qualities.”