P4P installs Europe’s first Jet Press 720S for folding carton applications

P4P was founded in 2015 by a small team with decades of experience in lean manufacturing systems and the packaging industry, and has been established to fill a reported gap in the European packaging market for high quality, low volume packaging, produced on demand.

The Fujifilm Jet Press 720S is a B2 format sheet-fed inkjet press, offering 4-color (CMYK) printing, a native resolution of 1200 x 1200 DPI and productivity of up to 2,700sph. The Jet Press 720S also features new generation Samba printheads, with each B2 width print bar containing 17 individually replaceable modular printheads, each with 2,048 nozzles. Replaceable modular printheads reduce the necessity for system downtime and minimise breaks in production for press maintenance, with a traditional offset-fed paper feed mechanism providing high registration accuracy and reliable operation. The print bar uses VersaDrop technology, allowing the size and shape of each ink drop to be precisely controlled and placed on the paper.

P4P has been built around the capability of the Jet Press 720S to produce high quality, short runs for packaging, combined with Kanban ordering and manufacturing principles. The sheet-fed inkjet press was the company’s first technology investment, and has allowed it to profitably and efficiently provide its clients with high-quality packaging to extremely tight deadlines, as well as producing samples and prototypes that match the media and print quality of the finished product.

Having discovered Fujifilm and its products while working in the automotive sector, P4P co-founder and CEO Mohamed Toual identified the combination of Fujifilm and its inkjet technologies as the ‘ideal solution’ for his new venture in the packaging sector.

‘Traditional printing in the packaging sector has always been problematic in two important areas,’ said Toual. ‘Prototypes were always inferior to the finished product – offering at best an indication of what the customer could expect – and there was also, inevitably, a time lag for the production run due to the amount of manual labour involved in the production process. The Jet Press 720S – which I believe is now the benchmark platform in this sector – has changed all this. Its quality, flexibility and efficiency means that these challenges have been overcome.’

Already used throughout Europe for commercial print applications, the Jet Press 720S has been reconfigured for digital folding carton printing. The redesigned model features a vacuum jacket and the ability to increase the vacuum pressure around the drum, allowing the press to accommodate a more diverse range of heavier carton boards commonly used in packaging applications.

‘Traditionally, clients in the packaging industry have doubted the ability of a digital press to match the quality of litho or flexo printing,’ continued Toual. ‘However, our customers have been hugely impressed with the quality of the products we have produced on the Jet Press 720S. The feedback we have received has been universally positive and we are very confident that this will continue.’

P4P’s investment in this new platform represents a European first, and Fujifilm anticipates many other packaging specialists will follow, and Taro Aoki, head of digital press products in the EMEA region at Fujifilm, stated: ‘The new configuration of the Jet Press 720S enables companies specialising in folding carton production to offer their customers ultra-high quality, short-run, versioned and personalised packaging, while also achieving substantial reductions in substrate waste and associated production costs. Fujifilm’s focus on the packaging market is growing, and the launch of the Jet Press 720S for packaging has been designed to give packaging printers and entrepreneurs the opportunity to carve out profitable new markets for their businesses.’