It's a kind of magic.

Reliable laser marking has long been common practice in the industrial world for the identification and decoration of products. In the printing and publishing industry, on the other hand, it is still in its infancy.

Print experts have different requirements on printing and identification than manufacturers of electrical components, for instance.If laser systems are going to be used in the printing industry on a large scale, real innovation is essential. The advantages of marking lasers are obvious: they are low maintenance, use very little in the way of consumables and offer maximum availability.

In direct printing CO2 and fibre lasers markpaper or cardboard surfaces directly.

Laser-sensitive coating change colour

• Printing ink, dye or varnish with lasersensitive pigments
• Choice of water, solvent and oil-based inks as well as UV-drying inks
• Laser beam creates high-contrast marking in coated areas

Colour removal with maximum precision

• Base material does not suffer burning from undesired laser impact
• Best results so far with coatings in black, blue or metallized

The printing material remains undamaged.Laser coding is now also possible for materials that were previously out of the question.

KBA-Metronic collaborates closely with Datalase and leading ink suppliers to determine the optimum use of various varnishes, dyes and inks.

More flexible than any other system

Publishers and letter shops can wrap their printed products in film or envelopes immediately after printing. With this method, the addresses are applied in the last step through the film onto theaddress field previously prepared with a laser-sensitive coating.

This has the advantage of precluding any loss of an address record during wrapping or insertion into the envelope.Packaging is preprinted in the printshop to the customer's equirement. A placeholder into which the individual product or production data are written as required is provided for laser coding.

Offline coding for added flexibility

Combining the laserSYSTEM with the semiautomatic separation solution, udaFORMAXX allows small batch sizes, special products, seasonal and campaign products to be coded just-in-time outside the production line at economically viable costs.That makes it particularly attractive for printshops, contract packers and letter shops.

The udaFORMAXX can be configured with a variety of printing systems. Formats can also be changed speedily, making it more flexible than any other system.