Flexographic Technical Association (FTA) saluted three forward-thinking member companies, recognizing their contributions to faster makeready, lower waste, enhanced safety, consistent quality, streamlined production and improved productivity; as it formally presented BOBST, Rossini SPA and Techkon with 2025 Technical Innovation Awards.

Honors were bestowed, Sunday, May 4, during FORUM INFOFLEX 2025’s Awards Banquet. The highly sought after and prestigious FTA’s Technical Innovation Award stands as recognition of the embodiment of a commitment to driving the future of package production through engineering ingenuity.

By name, the specific products lauded in 2025 were: BOBST’s Digital Inspection Table, Rossini’s FastBridge sleeve adapter and Techkon’s SpectroVision automated color measurement system.

Digital Inspection Table

BOBST’s Digital Inspection Table (DIT) permits users to interact with both the physical and digital representation of a product via dimensionally accurate projection. Benefits delivered include: faster make-ready, lower waste, consistent quality and simplified/streamlined production.

DITs facilitate predictability and repeatability by:

• Highlighting issues and augmenting a user’s trained skills
• Digitally tracking all quality decisions with a built-in reporting module
• Collecting and cataloging digital records
• Interfacing with tools, such as the smartphone microscope, to allow users to share and view product images that previously required a manual magnifying glass
• Ensuring production is setup correctly and maintains standards

BOBST explains, “The key is the creation of a true TwinPDF – a calibration pattern that is printed on a special material which doesn’t stretch, paired with a projection of the same pattern. Results obtained give operators the tools to troubleshoot, diagnose, and solve problems before going into main production.”

Engineers maintain, “Operators can verify plates before mounting them; check the printed product for register, pressure, and any differences between the customer PDF; insert additional transforms, to simulate stretch and shrink for different materials; and correctly capture an image of product to be compared to the TwinPDF.”

Designers note, “The technique removes all distortion that comes from the camera and the lens and compares a raw image capture of a calibration grid with a perfect digital representation. Images are perfectly aligned and dimensionally accurate, ready for analysis.”

Bridge Sleeve Adapter

FastBridge, an engineered, ultra-high modulus pneumatic bridge sleeve adapter, used in tandem with plate sleeves to absorb resonance and reduce bounce on today’s high speed presses, facilitates faster production with no reduction in print quality, according to Rossini.

ROI is quick, due to typical press speed increases of 30 percent over existing bridge technologies. Rounding out the list of attractive deliverables: lighter weight, easier handling, extended plate life, enhanced operator safety and excellent mechanical behavior.

Engineers report, “We successfully developed the air-mount FastBridge by utilizing sophisticated mechanical and dynamic simulation software, coupled with our own custom-made machinery. This allows us to achieve a bridge adapter sleeve with the characteristics necessary to absorb the inherent flexo forces at a frequency that virtually eliminates bounce.” 

Rossini’s FastBridge is certified to work with all types of printing inks and standard pressroom solvents with no swelling or deterioration of the surface. Developers explain, “A reinforced steel protection ring incorporates the notch, assuring higher resistance against impacts with the register pin during mounting operation. It also eliminates damages to the core sleeve that impacts total indicated runout (TIR).”

Designers express confidence that, “Consistency and repeatability can be achieved with utilization of FastBridge.” They urged printers/converters to, “Push the boundaries of press speed and print quality to ever increasing heights.”

Automated Color Measurement

Techkon’s SpectroVision, a recently introduced fully automated color measurement system, was designed from inception to be efficient and affordable. It combines the capabilities of three critical devices in one: a web inspection / web viewer, ISO/ANSI style bar code grader; and high-speed Inline spectrophotometer that takes 3000 individual measurements per second.

System components include:

• A scanning spectrophotometer with integrated white calibration plaque
• High-resolution 2D camera
• Motorized traverse arm
• ISO compatible white backing plate
• Cloud-based color quality software
• Dedicated press-side “command module” with ChromaQA software and two touch-screen displays
• An LED light stack that can be mounted anywhere near the press and communicates “Pass”/ “Fail” conditions audio-visually, as well as a predictive warning when approaching a pre-set tolerance limitation

Techkon identified a clear benefit of its use: “seamless data collection, sharing, reporting and analytics for every run and every sheet in two seconds. Paired with smart color bar detection algorithms, SpectroVision is capable of scanning an entire color bar – up to 100 color patches in length – in a single printed impression, at any press speed.”

System designers describe SpectroVision as, “easy to use and easy to learn.”

More to the point, they proclaimed, “It eliminates guesswork, helping achieve the required specifications set for the job. When the press operator has access to current color measurement data at 5- 10 second intervals, the color-matching process is noticeably expedited.”