The highly automated sheetfed, single-pass C500 Press is not being shown at Drupa, but HP is discussing the direct to corrugated machine under NDA at the show. The press, which is understood to designed to handle standard corrugated board sizes of around 1.8x3m, will go into beta next year, and begin commercial shipping in 2018.
HP large-format printing vice-president Xavier Garcia said: “This is the next industry set for analogue to digital transformation. HP has decided to help this industry to transform in the years to come.”
According to HP, the C500’s main strengths will be image quality, versatility and direct-to-board simplicity.
“This press is going to be extremely disruptive in this industry and is going to help customers to adopt digital with very little change in their workflow. With this press now I believe HP are the only player in the industry that has a solution that will feed any requirement of the corrugated industry,” said Garcia.
The press will join other existing HP machines for the corrugated market, including the HP Scitex series for short-run displays, the HP PageWide T400S for lamination and the HP PageWide T1100S for pre-print.
HP is also showing an Indigo WS6800 digital label press inline with a new JetFX finishing unit, developed in an exclusive partnership. The fully integrated label line is being shown as a technology demonstration producing labels with foiling and spot and tactile varnishing live at the show.
It has also expanded its HP Latex portfolio at the show, with the HP500 and HP1500 getting their mainstream launches at Drupa. They join the HP3000 and HP360 machines in the series.
