Aset-Bidoit, a leading French premium wine label printer, upgraded two of its Gallus TCS presses with RHINO, a flat bed foil embossing system by Pantec GS Systems. Aset-Bidoit, already convinced by their first RHINO in a rotary press, wanted to bring its efficiency and quality also onto their semi-rotary presses.

Pantec GS Systems technicians executed the entire retrofit directly by themselves. 3D foil embossed labels are drawing significantly higher attention on the point of sales due to their outstanding appearance. For these premium “flat bed embossing” look labels, inline efficiency was available for rotary systems only, so far. Now, semi-rotary presses can be equipped with the RHINO flatbed system also.

Rotary foiling can limit the speed of the press, especially with uncoated and structured papers. The advantage of print repeat flexibility of semi-rotary presses results in partial usage of the printing cylinder circumference. Depending on the system, only 50-80% is used. When talking about the press output on the roll, people may not consider that the process speed on the cylinder may be twice as much, forcing the machine speed to be reduced for an acceptable quality. Flat bed foiling with RHINO increases dwell time by at least factor 7. Therefore, foiling on uncoated papers is faster inline with RHINO.

Peter Frei, CEO of Pantec GS Systems, says: “Some semi-rotary presses basically double speed with RHINO, when stamping uncoated materials. Therefore, a RHINO into a semi-rotary press not only makes a printer to a strong player in foil embossing, but he gets a major performance increase.”