Self-sufficiency and industrial approach drive Eclipse in digital transformation
With four production sites and cutting-edge technologies, including the Fast On Paper lines from Italy’s MBA, the Prague-based company is now a key player at the European level
Eclipse is not the printing company that you expect to find in a country of ten million inhabitants, which has been recovering from decades of communism and two severe economic crises, and which joined the European Union only in 2004. Yet it was precisely the difficult post-Soviet Union fall years that provided the backdrop for the evolution of what was then a small printing house, as well as the personal history of its founder Václav Nosek. The company, initially focused on printing large-format posters, has gradually expanded its range of products and services, modernized its fleet of machines and increased its reputation in neighbouring countries, to the point of being considered today a small giant of digital printing. It’s a game that Nosek has chosen to play on the grounds of its products’ quality and sustainability. The printing of posters — which has used Italian water-based inkjet machines for about a year now — has gradually been flanked by increasingly flourishing production of corrugated cardboard displays. To support growth in both of these areas, Eclipse redoubled its focus on the latest digital technologies and opened three new production sites. To find out more about this printer, we visited our headquarters in Prague, an 11,000 m² building designed and built for the needs of the “new” Eclipse.
A cathedral of printing
Tichý Petr, production manager at Eclipse, took us on a tour of the plant that is also the group’s headquarters — a huge parallelepiped divided into three areas bordered by rows of pillars and elevated corridors. All the spaces can be configured on one or two levels, according to the production needs of the different departments, to make up a sort of cathedral of printing. The company also has three satellite production sites — in Hungary, Poland and Slovenia — as well as sales subsidiaries in Slovakia, Germany, Austria, Italy and Croatia.
What makes the Prague site unique, and distinguishes it from most European digital printing companies, is the presence of a corrugator. Together with a slitting and converting department for jumbo rolls, this equipment gives Eclipse full self-sufficiency for its needs of corrugated cardboard and paper, in sheets and rolls. Paper, as we shall see, is Eclipse’s most-used material, with rare concessions to plastic and an eye for fabric.
Hall 1 houses the materials warehouse and the corrugator, which is capable of producing E, B, C, EE, EB, and BC-flute cardboard up to a maximum width of 2.6m.
Hall 2 is dedicated to sheetfed offset printing, digital blueback printing (with HP Scitex TurboJets), laminating, trimming of printed posters, as well as printing on rigid and flexible media (with Durst Rho 1000 and Rho 1312 presses). The queen of the department is a new 1,300×1,850 mm Roland 900 XXL. Large-format sheetfed presses are also in use at other Eclipse sites, such as the 1,500×2,050mm Rapida 205 in Warsaw.
The top in large format
Hall 3 is the realm of digital printing. Entering it means taking a dive into the past, present and future of large-format technologies, given the extraordinary quantity and variety of machines installed. It starts with the solvent-based VUTEk UltraVU 2360 of the late ’90s, still fully operational. “One day we’re going to sell them at a high price for the EFI museum,” says Petr, amused. Then there’s a 1.6 and 3.2m HP Latex battery, some Océ Arizona flatbeds for high-quality jobs, and Durst Rho 512R and EFI VUTEk 5r presses for the very large format. Durst Rhotex and d.gen Arachne are also available for printing on polyester fabrics.
To support such a strong print focus, we see different cutting and milling systems in action, including a Zünd G3 and an Esko Kongsberg XP Auto with automatic loading and unloading. There’s also a Monti Antonio sublimation calender, as well as all kinds of technology for laminating, laminating, welding and sewing.
The challenge of posters on paper
Like all leading large-format billboard companies, Eclipse saw the Scitex Idanit, PressJet and TurboJet printers as an opportunity to make a digital breakthrough in its white paper and blueback billposting volumes between 2001 and 2003. At the time, the alternatives were few and mostly analogue. “We used to effectively produce all poster materials in screen printing, regardless of substrate and quantity, and the quality was what the market expected,” says Petr. “Then the average print runs started to shrink, and the screen printing quality became insufficient for many agencies, dealers and brand owners.” Eclipse, like most European printers in the advertising market, decided to compensate by moving to offset technology, which thanks to CtP and increasingly cheaper plates, was proposed as a functional, high-quality and economical alternative to screen printing. But not enough. “In the poster market, offset technology was and still is competitive from 150–200 pieces,” continues Petr, “but to make small quantities, just-in-time orders and produce formats and subjects with a high degree of customization, digital printing was and remains the only way. This led us to buy the first Scitex printers.”
But markets change. Thus Eclipse and dozens of its counterparts around the world are faced with the obsolescence of Scitex solvent technology, both in terms of quality (TurboJet uses 80-picoliter drops), environmental sustainability and reliability. HP’s decision (after it acquired Scitex in 2005) to develop a version of TurboJet with UV-curable inks and then, shortly afterwards, to abandon the central drum platform altogether, created more than one dilemma for Eclipse. In the Czech Republic and in some Central European markets, posters on paper continue to represent a significant business. “Billboards are a stable market, characterized by large volumes and a demand for ever-higher quality,” explains Petr. “We have been looking for alternative solutions to effectively print on blueback paper, also because both UV-curable and Latex are not ideal for this application, both functionally and economically.”
Towards industrial water-based production
After extensive research and countless unsuccessful tests, at FESPA 2017 Eclipse’s management approached Fast On Paper, a paper production line created by the newcomer MBA (Mario Belloli Automazioni). What Nosek encountered was a textile-derived printer, designed to print on paper at high speed, put in line with a high capacity unwinder, a drying oven, a buffering system, an automatic XY cutter and a sheet collection tray. The only brand he was familiar with was Fotoba, the producer of the cutter. The main unknowns, and at the same time a reason for curiosity, are the printer produced by MS and the innovative water-based inks formulated and produced by Isocarbo.
Accustomed to gambling, Eclipse installed Fast On Paper technology in September 2018. “Without shutting down TurboJet and backing up the offset, in autumn 2018 we began to concentrate volumes on the newly installed MBA line, immediately experiencing a number of advantages, such as high resolution and total absence of ink odour, both in production and on the printed material. Greater environmental sustainability, without additional costs, is another plus that customers have appreciated,” Petr says.
But the biggest challenge Fast On Paper has to face is the brilliance of the colours — a determining factor for the advertising market — and the durability of outdoor images, exposed to the sun and the elements. From these points of view, Isocarbo’s Isonik PG-K21 inks, progressively tested and validated by Eclipse for its processing on paper, guarantee an excellent result.
Scalability and repeatability
Eclipse knows how important reliability and repeatability are for providing printed material to brand owners and advertising dealers, order after order, all over Europe. The company also knows it’s essential to create economies of scale, reduce operating costs and minimize manual operations, with margins in constant decline.
Thanks to the solidity of the MS printers, the efficiency of the MBA modules and the precision and quality of the Fotoba cutters, Eclipse is gradually migrating its printing volumes (both those produced digitally using solvent presses and those produced in offset) to Fast On Paper. So much so that, since the beginning of 2019, the company has installed a Fast On Paper system in each of its plants, for a total of four twin lines. “So we have the complete redundancy of our systems, and we are able to handle large volumes as well as sudden processing peaks,” concludes Petr.
— English version by Brady Holt.
