Note Printing installs new KBA Rapida 76

Security printing operation Note Printing Australia has installed a new B2 KBA Rapida 76 eight colour perfector at its Craigieburn factory.

The new KBA Rapida is highly specified. Note Printing (NPA) will use it to print passports, including with photo realistic images, and a range of other security products.

The Rapida 76 comes with four printing units, a drying tower, a perfecting unit, and four further printing units. According to KBA this modern, high-performance sheetfed offset press will enable NPA to introduce numerous innovative technologies.

Neil Taylor, capital engineering manager at NPA, said, “We have only had the press for a short time, but it is clear the Rapida is providing NPA with a printing capability where there's a lot more control in colour management and visual inspection.”

Numbering, rainbow printing, and many other applications which are today standard in security printing can all be realised on the B2 press thanks to the incorporation of a whole raft of special and newly developed features. Special accessories for the handling of lightweight substrates and plastic films round off the configuration.

The photo realism on passports means the illustration quality is comparable to that of real photographs. To achieve this, parts of the image are printed in their full photographic resolution, while others are softened.

The four over four press for the printing of passports incorporates an additional drying tower ahead of the perfecting unit. In addition, the press allows mixed UV operation, which means that certain security features can be incorporated into conventionally printed documents via a UV process.

These features remain invisible under normal light. If the image is held under a UV lamp, on the other hand, the security feature is revealed – for example, native fauna might appear in the depicted landscape. Such effects represent significant improvements in the security standards for documents.

Note Printing Australia has been working with KBA-NotaSys for the past two decades, and has been using one of its security presses to produce banknotes and the inner pages of passports. To date, they have been printed in a combination of conventional and waterless offset. With the desire for greater design freedom and the ability to test new ideas on short-turnaround times, the company has switched to an exclusively wet offset process with a half-format sheetfed offset press.