Our Aim is completely replace Screen Printing

(NPES International E-commerce Website, August 29, 2008) Kartheinz Kaiser is Managing Director and co-owner of Christinger Partner AG in Schlieren (Swltzedand). The company has a workforce of 65 and ten digital printers. They generated a turnover of 10 million Euro in the fields of large format digital printing, signage and advertising printing, screen printing and production graphics.

How do you view the market of inkjet printing in Switzerland? Karlheinz Kaiser: Printing quality in Switzerland is high and we already have a high density of large format inkjet printers. Just three years ago we installed the first Turbojet in Switzerland and now there are four. This competition impacts on prices. However, the demand for LFP is growing, especially with Euro 08. We printed the adhesive films for twelve of the 13 trams advertising Euro 08 in the cities of Switzerland.

What wishes and requirements have your customers recently expressed?
Kadheinz Kaiser: We have clearly detected a desire for inkjet printing to be standardized in accordance with the ISO standard, especially as increasingly often we are delivering a mix of products including offset prints produced on the MAN Roland 900 XXL of our sister company Setaprint. The colour white is a second trend. This is needed with flatbed printing in particular when we print on transparent films or plexiglas.

What has the impact of this been on your company? Where are you particularly looking to invest in the near future?
Karlheinz Kaiser: We will continue to invest in flatbed printing because our aim is to completely replace screen printing. Through film printing and the use of white we are already able to cut out a great deal of screen printing. For example, for the Swiss Railways we have been able to print digitally on white polypropylene, whereas with screen printing this always caused us moire problems. Our next target is a digital printer that can print at the same quality as currently but much faster, because with digital printing we are able to print on many more different substrates than with screen printing.