When many of us think of corrugated packaging, we tend to think of those brown boxes that are sometimes delivered in the brown trucks by the drivers in the brown uniforms. In the packaging industry, these brown boxes are what is called secondary packaging. These boxes usually contain one or more primary packages that contain the actual product. The primary packaging is what is normally seen by the consumer and needs to graphically reflect what is inside. The brown corrugated secondary packaging is really just a way to protect the primary packaging until it gets to the consumer.

But what if we could eliminate the need for secondary packaging? That could reduce both shipping and production costs, as well as packaging waste. It could even reduce the amount of handling if what is shipped doesn’t need to be unpacked and can go directly to a shelf, or actually becomes the shelf with the product graphics in full display. This is the promise these new-single pass production inkjet corrugated solutions now deliver. Like some of you, I had an opportunity to see the EFI Nozomi and its resultant printed corrugated output at drupa 2016 (the press was not actually operating at the show) and it was impressive. At drupa, there was only an image of the HP PageWide C500. Recently, I had a unique opportunity to see this new corrugated press and its very impressive print production at the HP factory in Netanya, Israel, prior to its being shipped to the first beta site, also in Israel.

HP has been working on the design concepts for this machine for almost eight years, and the actual machine development for about four years. The results of this clean sheet design reflect not only the HP Scitex heritage in corrugated printing, but also deliver printing of almost offset quality. HP Scitex has its roots in the large format Scitex Vision division of Scitex that was acquired by HP in 2005. It started with the production of sign and display printers which gradually evolved into dedicated corrugated printers with the introduction of the HP Scitex 15000 in 2014, as they saw their display printers increasingly being used for corrugated printing. Just to further clarify -- or confuse – you, here’s a rundown on rest of the HP corrugated product line. In 2014, HP introduced the HP T400S, and in 2015 the HP T1100S; these are single-sided production printers based on HP’s T series of production inkjet presses for printing corrugated top liners. Top liners are printed and then laminated onto corrugated board as a part of the corrugated manufacturing process. The HP T1100S was developed in partnership with Koenig & Bauer.