For the third time, more than 800 visitors from all over the world attended the Gallus Innovation Days that took place from June 26-28. The event was held at the headquarters of Gallus, a member of the Heidelberg Group, in St. Gallen, Switzerland. The main attraction of the event was the premiere of the new digital label press, the Gallus Smartfire. Further innovations in the field of inline applications on conventional and digital Gallus presses also attracted the attention of visitors.

The Gallus Smartfire aims to show that getting started in digital label printing is possible with affordable investment amounts. The inkjet label printing machine, equipped with a 4-color printing head (CMYK) makes printing of ultra short runs starting from one single unit possible, while printing with water-based inks at a native resolution of 1600 dpi. The integrated inline converting module includes lamination, a cutting plotter for individual die cutting contors and a semi rotary diecutter. With this equipment, the Gallus philosophy “from pdf to finished diecut label in a single pass” also applies to the Gallus Smartfire.

Speaking of innovations, the Gallus Labelfire, Gallus‘ digital high end label press, was presented with a newly introduced Digital Embesllishment Unit (DEU). This DEU applies matte, gloss and spot varnish inline and in various heights, with which relief effects can be done. Especially impressive was the DEU in combination with a cold foil unit as with this method, metallic relief effects can be printed digitally. This method optically resembles hot foil stamping but does not cause any tool costs and is furthermore applicable on plastic substrates.

“More than 800 visitors from all over the world came to St.Gallen. During this event, we already sold a Gallus Smartfire to Poland. We were able to establish contacts with new customers and successfully conclude sales contracts with existing customers,” says Christof Naier, Head of Business Unit Label (Gallus). “I am pleased that the Gallus Innovation Days are accepted so well to our customers as well as to our partners. We look very confident into the future and the continuing growth of the label business confirms our decision to stick to this event.”

During one of the many live demonstrations, Claudio Nagel, product manager at Gallus, explains the new automated longitudinal and latitudinal register control on the Gallus Labelmaster.

In Gallus’ new showroom, the Print Media Center Label, visitors were shown the production of a multilayer label on the Gallus ECS 340, using a web shifting unit. This economic method of printing multilayer labels follows the trend of applying information of several pages on a product.

On the Gallus RCS 430, the visitors of the Gallus Innovation Days were able to see a flying imprint process and on the Gallus Labelmaster Advanced, a longitudinal and latitudinal register control was shown for the first time.