Brummen, Netherlands - GSE Dispensing presents American narrow-web printers with its latest, automated, lean ink management solution specifically engineered for small ink batches at Labelexpo Americas (9th-11th September, stand 558, Rosemont, Illinois, Chicago). The Colorsat® Switch ensures a fast, precise and waste-free means of achieving spot color on demand.

Maarten Hummelen, marketing director of GSE Dispensing, comments, “After the success at Labelexpo Europe, where the Colorsat Switch was sold to printers in Europe, North America and Africa, we are looking forward to similar interest from the US market at Labelexpo Americas. Our products provide modular solutions for any ink volume requirements, and offer optimal dosage accuracy for a waste-free process that typically improves ink yields by up to 30 percent.”

As label design lifecycles become shorter and limited edition promotional messages more frequent, short lead-times can be challenging to deliver. There is no room for error, and labor-intensive, unpredictable manual ink mixing is not cost-effective. Automated gravimetric ink dispensing systems, like the Colorsat Switch, eliminate these production bottlenecks and provide converters with fast, accurate, repeatable color.

The Colorsat Switch is engineered to dispense water-based, UV-curing or solvent-based ink batches into 1.3 gallon buckets with a typical four-component recipe of 11lbs produced in less than four minutes and to 0.01lbs accuracy. It has a modular design that has a capacity of 20 base inks of 55lbs, or can optionally be connected to 55 or 275 gallon totes. Benefits include easy exchange of buckets with base components and fast dispensing of exact quantities of ink for each individual job, eliminating operator error and ink overproduction or shortfalls. This results in a lean workflow that helps to minimize prepress overheads and tighten margins.

GSE also offers gravimetric dispensing units for quantities up to 1300lb and for a maximum of 32 different components. It can therefore provide solutions for a variety of print applications, from short-run labels to high-volume corrugated board production. The fast dispensing speeds are especially ideal for printing environments where different ink series are needed to ensure compatibility with a variety of substrates.

In addition, all dispensing units use GSE's Ink Management Software (IMS™), a user-friendly production management tool. This enables the operator to see details of existing recipes, store new color specifications and find any return inks that are available and suitable in real-time. This significantly reduces waste and storage space, as well as providing transparent per-job ink costs to manage profit margins.