Gent (Belgium), September 13, 2006 - Esko, the world leader in digital imaging of flexo plates, announces that the successful Cyrel Digital Imager (CDI) Spark 2120, a small footprint flexo imager designed for narrow web, tag and label printing, will be demonstrated at the DuPont/Pitman Company booth, #5403, during LabelExpo Americas. Built for digital photopolymer plates, ablative film, or polyester-base letterpress plates of up to 21" x 20", the imager performs all functions converters and prepress trade shops expect from CDI Spark flexo platesetters. "Our analog system was outdated. We looked at systems from quite a number of vendors, but selected the CDI Spark 2120 because of the price, the quality of the laser, and the software," says Dan Van Waveren, prepress specialist at Emerald City Label, the Northwest's leading wholesale label manufacturer. "It was bundled in a package that was great for a small print shop like ours. Also, as a narrow web printer, the imager was just the right size." The CDI Spark 2120 boasts fully variable resolutions from 2000 to 2540 ppi and is capable of screen rulings up to 200 lpi, with halftone imaging from 1-99% - suitable for high-quality tags and labels. "The whole system is a lot faster than analog. When we operated an analog system, plate production used to be the bottleneck. Now, we're able to complete our entire plate production for the day in a couple of hours," adds Van Waveren. "There's also quite a bit of difference in quality. We increased our standards for line width and type size. In fact, we're able to hold up to a 1% highlight dot. We were able to upgrade our prepress quality to match what our presses could do." La Universal Impressora of Mexico has also been pleased with CDI Spark 2120 digital imaging. Since 1988, they have been printing labels, flexible packaging, and paper cups on narrow web flexo presses. They are completely integrated in their process, working with suppliers as partners to develop strong capabilities and new products. They have owned a CDI Spark 2120 for about seven months. "The size of the CDI Spark 2120 was helpful, because we print up to 16" wide. Print quality was important to us-particularly highlights, because we print shrink labels and compete against gravure printers," remarks Luis Miguel Patiño. "We have also been impressed with the sharpness of the images we can print." Driven by Esko's Scope workflow, the CDI Spark 2120 integrates easily into highly demanding production environments where last minute changes and flexible sheet layouts are daily requirements. Through Esko's vast experience in digital flexo workflows, a rich and unique set of flexo-dedicated features is within reach of the CDI Spark customer, including state of the art screening, color management and dot gain compensation tools. "We developed the CDI 2120 to fulfill a need for a dedicated flexo imager for small label printers and trade shops," comments Jan Buchweitz, Esko Product Manager of flexo imagers. "These companies are rapidly migrating to digital flexo. When you add the costs for film, storage and chemistry-as well as the ecological value of less waste-there is a very strong ROI story for digital."