Swiss full-range supplier Gallus, a subsidiary of Heidelberger Druckmaschinen AG (Heidelberg), will be exhibiting under the banner “Speed up for Success” this year. And Gallus is certainly hitting the accelerator at Labelexpo in Brussels, where the spotlight will be firmly trained on its new Gallus Labelmaster and Gallus Labelfire machine systems alongside the latest offerings from Gallus Services and Gallus Screen Printing. The company is out to impress trade fair visitors with a spectacular performance.

Hot on the heels of the successful debut of the Gallus Labelmaster during the Gallus Innovation Days in September 2016, Gallus is now set to unveil the Gallus Labelmaster Advanced line with multiweb feature at Labelexpo 2017 in Brussels. The basic versions of this label printing press will also be on display.

The Gallus Labelmaster Advanced line’s impressive modular design combines maximum flexibility with a high level of automation. The new press offers label printers an unrivalled variety of processes, as the various finishing and printing units can be changed quickly and easily at any machine position.

All Gallus Labelmaster presses share the same special platform design and can be configured to meet the customer’s specific requirements. With its open interfaces, this machine series represents a highly secure investment and enables users to respond flexibly to future changes in the market.

In the new platform system, the Gallus Labelmaster is made up of modules each comprising two printing units. These modules are available in three different variants. The basic variant already covers all the essential label printing standards. The Plus version provides significantly enhanced flexibility to cover many applications in the label industry, and the Advanced line can meet virtually any requirement and be configured to include as much or as little automation as necessary. By offering this modular system, Gallus is ensuring that label printers can satisfy prevailing market requirements and always remain fit for the future – all for a level of investment that would previously have been inconceivable for premium products.

The new Gallus Labelmaster machine platform boasts a whole series of product highlights, such as an extremely short web path of just 1.4 m between printing units and a high maximum speed of 200 m/min, thus making the Gallus Labelmaster the fastest label printing press that Gallus has ever produced. The press can be controlled centrally via an HMI touch panel, although manual intervention is also supported, with operators able to make changes with ease and, more importantly, very quickly, thereby achieving extremely short setup times. The lightweight aluminium printing cylinders that have been specially developed for this machine type can be changed in just a few quick steps, thus ensuring that job changes can be completed with unparalleled speed.

An optimised ink chamber for the doctor blade needs just 250 g of ink and therefore keeps the associated costs low while minimising ink spitting and foaming. The newly designed flexographic printing unit, which benefits from the construction principles established in sheetfed offset at the parent company Heidelberg, is directly driven by two servomotors and delivers Gallus premium quality from the start. Besides being fitted out with flexographic printing units, the press can also be equipped with a newly developed screenprinting unit that enables users to make the most of high-end finishing options. The register accuracy of the Gallus Labelmaster is particularly striking – whether the press is being run at a low setup speed or accelerated to a high maximum speed, the printed image is always in register, without the slightest correction necessary. This performance highlights the precision of the Gallus Labelmaster.

At Labelexpo, Gallus will be focusing on reduced throughput times for manufacturing digitally printed labels by showcasing the Gallus Labelfire digital label printing press with added inline finishing processes. In contrast to existing digital label printing presses on the market, which only print digitally and then perform further processing steps for the label in a downstream process, the Gallus Labelfire can produce finished and die-cut labels in a single production operation. Thus the Gallus Labelfire achieves faster production times for digitally printed finished labels and wastes less paper. This saves label printers time, costs and material compared to a multi-step production process, as there is no changeover required for subsequent further processing. And thanks to the latest-generation inkjet printing heads from Fujifilm, the Gallus Labelfire achieves a native resolution of 1200 dpi, which is comparable with offset printing quality.

The new service offerings from Gallus fit hand-in-glove with Industry 4.0 and ensure label printers benefit from higher availability of their machinery. Gallus and Heidelberg are collaborating on many specific projects which advance the digitization in the print shops and deliver added value to customers. For example, the “M-Call” product enables automated ticket manufacturing, in which the printing press independently communicates all the necessary machine data to the Gallus helpdesk. This does away with the initial telephone calls and emails otherwise required to log the case, which is precisely how M-Call speeds up the service organisation’s response times.

Gallus customers also benefit from the almost completed integration of Gallus sales and service organizations into the Heidelberg Group. This means that Gallus will be able to access Heidelberg's worldwide service network in the future. Gallus customers will now benefit from the dense global network of Heidelberg local service organisations and thus faster on-the-spot service.

Gallus Screeny will impressively demonstrate at Labelexpo 2017 that rotary screen printing speed no longer needs to be a limiting factor in label printing. By selecting the right system components, users can significantly accelerate screen/flexographic combination printing without having to trade this off against quality. The screen printing experts at Gallus will be showcasing the system components required for this under the banner “Gallus Screeny – easy to use, fast to print”. A Gallus Labelmaster equipped with Gallus Screeny speedprinting components will present the incontrovertible evidence during the trade fair by producing labels at speeds that set new benchmarks.

The screen printing department will also be teaming up with Heidelberg to showcase the new Phoenix UV LED direct platesetter. With this innovative exposure system, high-quality printing formes can be produced for almost all printing processes. Whether for screen, flexo, offset and letterpress printing, the Phoenix offers a future-proof solution for the production of high-quality printing plates with the best profitability.