According to Christophe Lievens, director of sales and marketing pre-press, the ThermoFlex is a Belgium made product and during the development process, the company focussed mainly on three pillars – quality, productivity and operational handling. “We are unique in that,” he said.

Later Lievens added, “The resolution on our machine is up to 5080dpi. But quality for us is not just the resolution, but also the way you build the machine. If you look at the machine from inside, it’s a robustly built machine. All the quality critical components are mounted on a block of granite to make sure we have a very stable and accurate imaging. The motors we use inside are linear motors so that the movement of the plates is very smooth, fast and eliminates maintenance.”

Aneesh Raj, general manager for sales and marketing at Repro Graphics, added, “There are elements like the direct drum drive, which has a motor mounted directly onto the drum. It avoids any slippage of the belts. Every system that we sell has an auto calibration system inside. So at any moment in time, the customer can calibrate his optics to have the highest quality but also consistent quality.”

In terms of productivity, the ThermoFlex 48 delivers a maximum plate size of 900x1200mm (35x38-inch) and produces six sqm per hour while the ThermoFlex 60 is a bigger 1067x1524mm (42x60) sized kit and can produce around 12 sqm per hours, which Lievens claimed is the fastest.

At the show, Flint also introduced a new LED exposure unit for flexo plates, the Catena-E 80, which can be added to the existing or new ThermoFlex 80 or 60 imaging systems.