Landa Partners with Three Leading Press Manufacturers

In the days leading up to drupa, which began yesterday in Dusseldorf, Germany, Landa Corp., led by Indigo founder Benny Landa, announced three strategic partnerships with three leading offset press manufacturers. Komori, manroland and Heidelberg will all collaborate on the development of printing presses using Landa's new Nanographic digital printing process.

Landa NanoInk is comprised of pigment particles only tens of nanometres in size. These nano-pigments are extremely powerful absorbers of light and enable unprecedented image qualities. Landa Nanographic Printing is characterized by ultra-sharp dots of extremely high uniformity, high gloss fidelity and the broadest CMYK color gamut of any printing process.

According to Landa, Komori was the first to be exposed to this technology, and thus was the first-to-be-announced global strategic partner. Citing the ever-growing customer demand for shorter run lengths, Yoshiharu Komori, Komori president, chairman and CEO noted, "we have embraced Landa Nanographic Printing as a powerful solution for our next-generation sheetfed and webfed digital systems that use water-based inks. Moreover, this decision accords with Komori’s new policy of operating as a ‘Print Engineering Service Provider’ to meet various future-oriented demands from customers."

Raphael Penuela, executive vice president for manroland sheetfed, added, "Landa Nanographic Printing technology offers the versatility of digital printing together with the qualities and speed of offset printing. It’s a great strategic fit. Our goal will be to deliver to our customers new digital printing solutions by converting their existing offset presses to Nanography."

Heidelberg's partnership with Landa Corp. was announced only yesterday.

"Our customers need both offset and digital," acknowledged Bernhard Schreier, Heidelberg CEO and chairman of the management board. "We will be able to complete our solutions to address our customer demands with Landa Nanography. The Landa Nanographic Printing process will enable us to offer digital versatility with the strength of offset for which Heidelberg is renowned."

The Landa Nanographic Printing process creates images of remarkable abrasion and scratch resistance. Most notably, it can print on any off-the-shelf substrate, from coated and uncoated paper stocks to recycled carton; from newsprint to plastic packaging films—all without requiring any kind of pre-treatment or special coating—and no post-drying. Adding to this cost benefit is the fact that Nanographic images are only 500 nanometres thick—about half the thickness of offset images—enabling Landa NanoInk to produce the lowest cost-per-page digital images in the industry.