KBA Leads the Industry with Explosive LED-UV Instant Cure-to-Print Trend
With the explosive rise of UV technology and especially LED-UV, KBA North America (Booth 213) is leading the industry in the meteoric rise of this technology and promoting its advantages and benefits. As an expert in this field, KBA offers its new LED-UV technology—KBA’s VariDry LED-UV. LED-UV curing is a low-energy drying technology that delivers numerous benefits. These include a particularly high print quality, ability to stand out on critical uncoated and offset stock with sharp dots and high color brilliance, no fold breaks even with high ink coverage due to elastic polymerization, and the elimination of printing powder. The LED-UV process is environmentally friendly because it consumes little energy, and its ink systems are free from mineral oils. It consumes only 20% of the energy needed by conventional UV processes. KBA’s research and development team in Germany, along with its ink partners, have successfully integrated this instant cure-to-print technology as a modular, interchangeable LED-UV curing platform into its press line, and is able to offer highly knowledgeable assistance to its current and prospective customers to immediately capitalize on LED-UV’s many advantages and benefits.
Hederman Brothers, a KBA customer located in Mississippi, has been an early adopter of LED-UV; in fact, they have been printing with it from day one, and have transitioned to LED-UV 100% of the time with their latest installation. The KBA Rapida 106 41" sheetfed press is the first of its kind in North America with dual high-power XP-11 LED lamps. Curing and color quality that’s capable with LED-UV is the reasoning behind why Hederman Brothers is a huge advocate of this breakthrough technology. The firm prints on all variations of paper stocks and substrates with LED-UV inks and LED-UV coatings.
By investing in a Rapida 106 equipped fully with LED-UV, Hederman Brothers has been able to improve its day-to-day operations and its overall efficiencies. An esteemed press operator at Hederman of more than 23 years expressed how the new press has faster makereadies and dry time—no powder is needed with LED which dramatically increases turnaround time—optimizing time on the printing room floor. They have been able to acquire new customers who require print jobs specific to LED (on uncoated pieces). Hederman Brother’s customers realize the benefits of the transition to full LED, as well as the ability to have spot UV-coating in their print runs.
