DuPont celebrates five decades of Cyrel

The year 2024 has marked the 50th anniversary celebration for the DuPont Cyrel brand, which introduced its first photopolymer plate to the flexographic printing industry in 1974. Since then, Cyrel has continued to break new ground, setting the pace of innovation in the industry.

‘This is an extraordinary moment for DuPont and the entire Cyrel team. Throughout this journey, we have brought countless innovations to the market and have always prioritized developments in collaboration with our customers,’ commented Tucker Norton, global business director for DuPont Cyrel Flexographic Solutions.

The past five decades have been marked by several achievements. For instance, in the 1990s DuPont transformed the flexo pre-press workflow with the Cyrel Digital Imager (CDI). The introduction of the CDI allowed pre-press teams to migrate from an analog workflow, to a modern, digital ‘Computer to Plate’ workflow.

In 2000, DuPont became the first flexo plate manufacturer to introduce a thermal workflow, the Cyrel Fast system, which allowed flexographic plates to be processed without the use of chemical solvents. This innovation reduced plate-processing time and had significant environmental benefits including a 53 percent savings in greenhouse gas generation and a 63 percent reduction in non-renewable energy consumption compared to Solvent as noted in our LCA.

The last decade has been marked by a period of intense innovation as many additional technologies have been brought to market by DuPont. The Cyrel Easy Plate, introduced in 2015, was the first plate with a flat top dot directly in the plate, which simplified the prepress process and allowed customers to achieve increased productivity and consistency. 

Later, DuPont introduced Cyrel Easy-R Plates, which represented an even more advanced family of plate formulations, building on the Cyrel Easy platform, further advancing performance on press, and making the plates even easier to handle in the plate room.

Looking to improve ink transfer, DuPont introduced the Cyrel Easy Brite screens in 2018, asking the industry, ‘How bright is your white?’ The screens were designed to optimize ink laydown in high-volume ink transfer applications, typically seen when printing a white undercoat, or solid areas with spot colors. These screens have led to ink savings on press, as printers were able to use this screening technology to achieve an even greater opacity while using less ink.  

More recently, DuPont launched the Cyrel Lightning Plate series for both the solvent and thermal platemaking workflow, optimized for a UV-LED exposure. This technology received the prestigious 2022 Flexographic Technical Association Innovation Award and again set the bar for technical excellence in the industry.

Reflecting on this milestone, Norton commented: ‘For more than 50 years, our team of passionate flexo experts have worked tirelessly to bring technological advances to the packaging and printing industry. We are committed to continuous innovation and look forward to perfecting flexography together with our partners and customers in the next decade.’