Heidelberger Druckmaschinen AG (Heidelberg), Germany, and Landa Corporation of Rehovot, Israel, today announced a global strategic partnership to collaborate on the development of Nanographic Printing Presses to expand digital offerings for mainstream printing, including short-to-medium runs, variable data and quick turnaround printing. Heidelberg intends to develop, manufacture, sell and service new generation of digital printing presses based upon Landa Nanographic Printing technology. 

Bernhard Schreier, Heidelberg CEO and Chairman of the Management Board, says, "Heidelberg is today, on the eve of drupa 2012, announcing this strategic partnership to signal the market Heidelberg's commitment to the long-term success of its customers. As market leader, innovator and integrator, we are keenly aware of our customers' need for high volume production, cost effective printing of short runs, and quick turnaround times. It is those very needs that led us to develop our benchmark Anicolor systems and the very successful partnership with Ricoh on dry toner based digital presses. And it is those same needs that led us to embrace Landa Nanography for a new generation of digital presses for commercial printing. The fact is, our customers need both offset and digital. In addition to our Linoprint C and Linoprint L offering, we will be able to complete our solutions to address our customer demands with Landa Nanography. The Landa Nanographic Printing process will enable us to offer digital versatility with the strength of offset for which Heidelberg is renowned." 

Benny Landa, founder, Chairman and CEO of Landa Corporation, says, "The Heidelberg-Landa alliance is a major step towards achieving our strategic goal of industry-wide adoption of Nanography for mainstream digital printing. As the market leader, Heidelberg's adoption of Landa Nanographic Printing for its new  generation digital presses is a clear message to the entire market: For the foreseeable future, offset and digital will not only co-exist, but will complement one another - offset for medium-to-longer jobs and digital for short-to-medium run lengths, not to mention variable data printing. At last there is a digital printing technology that has both the speed and customer economics to fill that role - and Heidelberg is certainly well-positioned to take it to market."

At the heart of the Nanographic Printing process is Landa's water-based NanoInk. Comprised of pigment particles only tens of nanometres in size, these nano-pigments are powerful absorbers of light and enable unprecedented image qualities. Landa Nanographic Printing is characterised by ultra-sharp dots of extremely high uniformity, high gloss fidelity and the broadest CMYK colour gamut. 

Landa Nanographic Printing employs ink ejectors to create the digital ink images which are applied to the printing stock in a process that can operate at extremely high speeds creating images with remarkable abrasion and scratch resistance. Most notably, it can print on any off-the-shelf substrate, from coated and uncoated paper stocks to recycled carton; from newsprint to plastic packaging films - all without requiring any kind of pre-treatment or special coating - and no post-drying. Adding to this cost benefit is the fact that Nanographic images are only 500 nanometres thick - about half the thickness of offset images - enabling Landa NanoInk to produce the lowest cost-per-page digital images in the industry: All of this from a water-based, energy-efficient and eco-friendly process. 

Benny Landa concludes, "I take great personal pride in announcing this global partnership between our two companies. Heidelberg's reputation for quality and technological innovation is legendary, as is the extraordinary level of customer loyalty which Heidelberg enjoys. Heidelberg's technological and market strengths, as well as its focus on excellence, are a great fit with Landa and we are very excited about this important alliance."