Top 10 showstoppers at PrintPack 2015 - The Noel D'Cunha Sunday Column

With 75 days to go, my hunch is, it will be 30% bigger than the 2013 event in terms of floor space and number of exhibitors.

The Sunday Column is a curtain raiser of the flagship print show in India, which is set to be the biggest to date.

One.

More than 325 leading names (as of 25 November) from the graphic art industry will show the latest developments in equipment, software, materials and systems, at the event. The show without a shadow of a doubt is the biggest exhibition in India and the second largest in Asia. The importance of the show can be gauged by the fact that the CEOs from Canon, Mitsubishi, Komori - shall inaugurate the show on Wednesday morning - along with their counterparts from India.

Two.
Komori has had a dream run in 2014. Komori’s India representative Insight Communications has installed 20 offset presses from 1 April to 31 October 2014. This includes: four presses in Gujarat and two presses in East India. Plus nine presses were bought by various customers in South India and five presses were shipped to North India. The highlight is the arrival of ten Enthrone and Lithrone 29-inch size presses which have arrived in various parts of India - Ranchi, Meerut, Rajkot, Vishkapatnam, Surat, Ahmedabad, Delhi, Cochin and Hyderabad. Besides an HUV push, Komori may unleash "a big surprise" at the show.

Three.
Resonating with the Prime Minister's clarion call, Made in India, is the theme at the show. For starts, there are the web offset players in Faridabad, plus a major hub like Amritsar, which my team and I visited in November. What I saw was an eye opener. We saw manufacturers of corrugated box making machines, die-cutting machines, paper cutting machines and small machines for perforation work. As IPAMA’s president, K S Khurana, who was kind enough to be our guide, said, "Around 125 die-cutting machines a month are produced which is 80% of India’s total production." Besides Amristar, I can vouch that  Ahmedabad and Rajkot in Gujarat are also doing well. Then there is Coimbatore with Autoprint which has eight players. Bengaluru and Karnataka are solid. Trivandrum has Welbound and then there is TechNova, Cosmo Films and Manugraph in Maharashtra.

Four.
Speaking of Manugraph, I am quite impressed with the Ecoline. Manugraph will be showcasing this versatile single-width, single-circumference press for newspaper printing. Launched this year, the new Ecoline press allows for four-colour printing on just one operating level.

PrintWeek India's associate editor, Rahul Kumar will have an update from TPH, KK Printing, J Mahabeer, Ronald, Prakash Offset ... soon. So watch this space for more.

Five.
Canon India is very serious about growing at a healthy double-digit. And "capture 30% of the digital print market share in India." To achieve this, they will have one of the biggest stalls at the show. The highlights at the stall are the ImagePress C7011VP, the recently launched C800; and the Dreamlabo 5000 Gallery which has two major installations in India, those at Edathadan Digital Press (Kochi) and GK Vale (Bengaluru).

Six.
Kodak, Fuji and TechNova will display the plates. Kodak's Sonara XP range of CTP plates which has been available in larger plate sizes with widths of up to 1,495 mm and a 0.44mm gauge is process-free. Since it eliminates the chemistry, electricity, water and equipment used in plate processing, it is responsible for saving million litres of water. Fuji will showcase the current portfolio and process-less thermal and low-chem violet plates. Meanwhile, TechNova's chem-free plates have been rolled out. It has its first installation at a CTP unit in Ahmedabad.

Seven.
Macart and Monotech will focus on inkjet. Macart's stall will adorn the JetArt, UV inkjet label press launched at Labelexpo 2014. JetArt is based on a Piezo drop-on-demand technology and uses Konica Minolta or a Kyocera printhead that uses UV, water and oil inks to print at a speed of 50-metre/min. Monotech, on the other hand will display the Jetsci VSRI 330 variable data printing machine

Eight.
It's a LED PrintPack. Ryobi shall have its LED debut. The Indian stalls to watch out for are UV Graphics and APL. The news from APL's stable is from Coimbatore-based Shree Maruthi Printers who are showcasing LED-UV printing technology, perhaps the first time in India. With this new add-on on Shree Maruthi’s 10-colour Heidelberg press, their customers will be able to reap the benefits of the technology from next month, informs Thilak Kumar, the company’s director.

Nine.
QuadTech's latest innovation Color Quality Solution, which the company claims to be the world's first in-line colour and ink control for packaging presses will be its star product at the show. With this solution, the user is able to share and process colour data between inline colour control and off-line colour measurement devices. How it helps is that the colour quality stays within targets and consistently high while downtime and wastage are reduced.

Visitors must spend time at the Param ERP and Finsys ERP too.

Ten.
And finally, it is the India Expo Centre at Greater Noida. My team spoke to Prashant Vats of IPAMA and this is what he said, as an ex-Technical Director of India Expo Centre: "The Expo Centre has the latest technical equipment to organise any kind of exhibition. It is one of the best exhibition grounds in north India and I sincerely hope that the exhibitors will be greatly benefited as a very large number of Indian and foreign B2B business visitors would be coming to witness PrintPack 2015.  It eliminates unwanted crowd, just like in other venues."

I vouch for it having seen the AutoExpo show in February 2014 at the same venue.