Labels were born in the 18th century in Europe. The first batch of labels were used for the identification of medicines and cloth goods. Today, 300 years later, label printing has long been into the millions of households and has become the industry’s wind vane of technological innovation.

The development speed and innovation technology in label printing is changing day by day. Nowadays, under the drive of “Intelligent”, “Internet of Things” and “Industry 4.0”, on-demand, variable and instant are the advantages of digital printing for labels.

HP Indigo Digital Printer

To drive the printing and packaging industry toward more flexible, efficient, and profitable digital printing, HP is enriching its line of labeling and packaging solutions. Over the past decade, HP has introduced a range of digital printing presses, and in 2012, HP introduced the Series 4 of HP Indigo digital presser. HP Indigo Digital Printing Press has become a powerful tool for label printing manufacturer to break through production constraints.

Main HP Indigo Digital Printing Press for Labels

Currently, HP Indigo WS6600, WS 6800 and WS 6900 digital presses are the best sellers and widely used by many label printing enterprieses. They are all designed and produced on the basis of HP’s market-leading narrow web printing solutions, mainly for high-volume digital labeling and packaging production. And HP Indigo 6000 series of printers can print a variety of types of labels, has no limited layout width, and is easier to operate and more productive. Technical parameters of HP Indigo 6000 Series show below.

HP Indigo Digital Press Printing Technical Parameter

Printing Technology	Electrostatic Imaging, HP Indigo electronic ink (liquid toner);
Printing Colors	Available with up to 7 colors of ink, stipple images (4, 5, 6 or 7) or spot color images or combinations.
Resolution	812 dpi, 8-bit; Addressable capacity: 2438×2438 HDI (High Definition Imaging)
Web Width	Maximum 340 mm
Printing Speed	30 m/min (4-color printing mode); 40 m/min (enhanced production mode);
Printing Material	HP Indigo certified for a wide range of surface-treated papers and films from 12 to 450 microns thick
Digital Front-end (DFE)	HP SmartStream Server supported by Esko. Now installed is the HP Production Pro, a more expansive digital front end.

HP Indigo 6K Digital Printing Presser

HP Indigo 6900 Digital Press is now the world’s most advanced digital printing press for labels. It comes with Pack Ready for Labels for improved label tolerance, HP Indigo metallic silver ink, and a new high-performance digital front-end server. HP Indigo 6900 Digital Press enables converters to produce any narrow-width label, flexible packaging, sleeve labels, in-mold labels (IML), wrap-around labels or folding carton jobs with easy and fast changeover.

Advantages of HP Indigo 6900 Digital Printing Press for Label Printing

In addition, HP Indigo 6900 digital printing press supports the digital production of a wide range of print media, including 0.5~18pt synthetic materials and paper. Substrate materials can be pre-optimized for processing or standard materials, and primer solutions can be in-line or off-line. A wide range of environmentally certified substrates as well as environmentally friendly primers, varnishes and adhesives are supported.

The application of HP Indigo Extended Color Gamut adds further value to printing solutions, including metallic silver e-inks, fluorescent inks, and invisible inks. It has a range of white ink combinations as well as a variety of opaque colors, including pearl white electronic ink. This is a versatile opaque white ink that requires only a thin coat, dries thoroughly and cures to produce an opaque white color that is comparable to the quality of silkscreen printing in just one printing process.

HP Indigo 6900 digital printing press is also equipped with the necessary tools to help achieve optimum quality and multiple layers of brand protection, offering a variety of security features including microtext, traceability solutions, adaptive workflow solutions and invisible security inks. All of these are printed in a single pass on a single press.

Other Features of HP Indigo 6900 Indigo Digital Printing Press

• Pack Ready for labels produces a wide range of highly resistant labels for the food, household, chemical and pharmaceutical industries.
• The new HP Indigo Electronic Metallic Silver inks achieve metallic effects in a wider color gamut, approaching Pantone 877.
• HP Indigo Electronic UV Photochromic Blue and Yellow inks can be used for brand protection and promotional labeling.
• HP Indigo GEM post-press finishing unit, the industry’s first all-digital, one-pass label printing and finishing line, enables post-press finishing such as partial varnishing, tactile texturing, foil stamping, laser holography, ultra-fine texturing and lamination.

In addition, the HP Indigo 6900 digital press is now equipped with high-performance HP Production Pro for the label and packaging industry.

Production Pro Features

• Five times faster RIP speeds
• Equipped with the Esko Color Engine
• A powerful digital front-end that dramatically improves productivity
• Scalability for continuous digital production.

The digital front-end allows converters to upgrade and manage digital production processes across multiple factories and presses, increasing the number of jobs processed per day and shortening lead times.

HP Digital Printing Factory for Labels – Hengping Industry

The label printing factory of Hengping Industry was equipped with HP Digital Printing Presses. In 2011, we introduced HP Indigo 4500 digital printing presses into our factory. After that, we kept to introduce HP Indigo 6K Series digital printing presses.

A New Era of Label Printing for Hengping Industry

HP Indigo digital printing press helps us create integrated and personalized label solutions for our customers, giving new life to printing with innovation.

In addition to creating a personalized look, HP digital label printing also has a role to play in anti-counterfeiting labels. It skillfully combines the aesthetic elements of design with the logic of anti-counterfeiting traceability to form beautiful and practical product anti-counterfeiting labels.

In addition, the digital holographic anti-counterfeiting technology of HP digital printing presses also provides more possibilities for our customers’ labeling solutions.

HP INDIGO Digital Printing Principles

HP digital presses, like traditional letterpresses, lithographic offset presses, flexographic or screen printing presses, use liquid inks to print images. The biggest difference is that HP HPElectroInk technology is that the ink contains charged particles that electronically control the position of the ink without having to first make a physical printing plate to mark graphic and non-graphic areas.

Hewlett-Packard digital printing press using a photoelectric imaging plate (Photo Imaging Plate, PIP) charge adsorption of ink, unlike traditional printing presses can not be changed using a fixed (etching) plate, HP Indigo Photoelectric Imaging Plate is a dynamic photographic plate (looks like a photoconductive drum), the plate Jane each rotation can carry different information, reproduced by the laser head in the form of graphics The laser head reproduces the information in graphic form.

The charge unit (Scoroton) generates an electrical charge that adsorbs the ink from the developing unit (BID) onto the photopolymer imaging plate (PIP) rather than physically transferring it from the cartridge to the drum. The ink is adsorbed onto the PIP or released from the PIP depending on the voltage variation.

From the photopolymer imaging plate (PIP), the electronic ink is later transferred to the intermediate transfer rollers in a process similar to conventional offset printing. The role of the blanket is equivalent to shock absorbers and pressure transfer pads, used to ensure that the ink is uniformly transferred to the substrate; it can also dry the liquid toner in the water, so that it is transferred to the substrate before the formation of a uniform layer. This allows HP digital presses can be widely used in a variety of different surface textures and thicknesses of printed materials.

HPIdigo technology offers a range of advantages over traditional offset printing, such as eliminating incomplete ink transfer (drop splitting) that is associated with traditional offset printing. HP HPIdigo rubberized cloth transfers 100% of the ink to the substrate. The complete ink transfer on the rubber cloth allows all graphic information to be printed by the same set of roll simplicity, ensuring accurate registration and overall color consistency.

After ink transfer, the PIP is cleaned up by passing through a cleaning station (similar to a sponge) and then the charger is re-charged before the laser head generates the next color separation image. The blanket is also cleaned after each print run.

Hewlett-Packard has created a new model where each rotation of the imaging rollers produces a different color, and the color image is transferred uniformly to the rubber cloth before it is transferred to the substrate all at once, so there are no more dot gain or registration problems.

As the most active part of the entire process, HP Indigo e-Ink is a unique liquid toner (unlike other technologies) in which the toner particles are suspended in a liquid, which combines the advantages of digital printing with the characteristics of liquid toner. Electronic inks create a wide color gamut, are highly accurate, and produce crisp images with smooth color transitions, a level of quality that HPIndigo claims is far beyond that of equivalent competing digital printing technologies.

HP digital presses can print seven colors, but because each color must be individually imaged and transferred to the substrate, each additional color used is an additional layer of ink, which can affect or reduce the overall result and yield in equal proportion. Since each additional color counts as a “click”, it has an impact on the printed result, and for this situation, HPIndigo has developed the Enhanced Production Mode (EPM), which has an impact on CMY-only printing as well. Color can print a reasonable image effect, each printing cost savings of 1/4, and speed up to 40m/min. There is also a faster version of the dual-engine 8000 models, printing speed up to 80m/min.