A month ago Kodak sent out a press release about their new Nexpress printing press. This press has a very nifty feature that has not been seen before in the printing world. It’s a digital press that lays down what they call “Dimensional Clear Dry Ink”. It’s a special coating – like varnish, or gloss – that creates a raised printing surface to the printed piece.
It’s a 3d effect that you can feel with your fingers, which makes it unlike anything done before. Imagine a photo of an orange. With this new Nexpress and the Intelligent Dimensional Coating Solution, you can actually “feel” the dimples of the orange on the paper. If you hold the paper at an angle, you can see how the light reflects as if it were bouncing off a dimpled surface.
The special dimensional ink can be applied to just about anything designers can dream up for printing. In an overcompetitive market, it’s essential that advertisers stand out from the rest of the crowd. Using dimensional printing will help draw attention in a unique way. It’s certainly going to draw interest from whoever receives a printed piece from this new press. These days, gaining an “edge” like this can make a huge difference to a company that is looking to communicate its message to a wide audience.
When I heard about this Nexpress, I looked it up online. Yes, google is my friend. Most of what I saw for “dimensional printing” was related to 3D printing – a very different concept completely. 3D printing is also a very cool technology, which I believe was developed at MIT. It’s very specialized and does require dedicated machinery. So anyway, after skimming past all the “3D printing” results on google, I found some more information about this Nexpress. Check it out here on Kodak’s website.
It all sounds very cool to me. Then I found out that one of the printers we use here on Long Island is planning on acquiring one of these presses in a couple of months. As soon as it arrives and goes online, I’m sure we’ll be running some test projects to see for ourselves just how good this product can be. If it meets all the hype, we may just set ourselves up to run some live jobs with the dimensional ink. I’m sure our clients would love the opportunity to try something cool and different.
I’ll provide an update on this in the near future.