Wrapping up today, the biannual Hunkeler Innovation Days focused on success through automation, as the finishing giant and most of the world's continuous feed inkjet solutions developers showed their latest equipment.
Some 6,500 printers showed up in the foothills of the Swiss Alps for the four day event, which for the continuous inkjet sector is the most important date outside of drupa.
There are 100 exhibitors at the show, including most of the big names, with the focus on continuous feed inkjet, with all aspects covered from pre-press through to finishing.
Both Screen and Ricoh are showing reelfed colour systems with inks that do not carry into the fibres of the stock, so giving, they say, an offset quality to the print. The Ricoh Pro VC70000 is making its debut appearance, and its livery was a refreshing change from the grey box. The Océ ProStream was also printing onto offset coated paper in both roll to roll and roll to stack formats, with a cutter creating B2 sheets.
Xerox has its Trivor webfed inkjet, first shown at drupa last year, while HP is showing further updates to its thermal printhead technology. It isn't all inkjet though, Xeikon has its CX500 toner based printer, which it is using to print books covers, while Nipson is showing its 300mpm MagySpeed which prints MICR.
Hunkeler itself is not the only finishing supplier at the event, Muller Martini is there with systems including an integrated flowline and a robot trimmer. Horizon, supplied by Currie Group in ANZ, was integrating its perfect binders and trimmers with Hunkeler unwind modules and cross cutters, which then send the block to the Horizon BQ480 PUR binder.