For the second year in a row, Polytype was the recipient of the North American Tube Council’s Tube of the Year Award in the category ‘Best innovative component or process.’ While the Linearis machine won in 2013, the capabilities of the RDA 24-165 Hybrid were able to convince the 2014 panel of judges.
The innovation shown on this tube is the capability to combine the benefits of two printing methods. On one hand, there is dry offset printing with the benefits to create sharp lettering, to realize good and homogenous surfaces with low ink cost for a tube. Dry-offset ink is four times less expensive than inkjet ink with the possibility to use Pantone colors as required for brand logos. Shown on this tube, all text is printed in dry-offset and the colors of the Polytype and Pro6 logos are made with Pantone inks. Simple graphics on a large surface, like the fire pattern, are also made in dry-offset. On the other hand, there is inkjet printing with its own benefits the easy realization of colorful, photorealistic prints like the ice princess shown on the tube. There is also the possibility to make personalized tubes, each with a different design.
Even to make something which was not conceivable until today now becomes possible printing on tubes and closures in one run and thus increasing the product marketing surface. The combination of these two printing methods brings a benefit in change-over time, meaning that difficult sections will be made in digital, and easy sections in dry-offset. This entire decoration was created on the RDA 24-165 Hybrid machine from Polytype, with up to six inkjet printing colors and up to 8 dry-offset colors. The decoration speed of this machine is typically 165 tubes a minute, but depends on diameter and printing length of the inkjet design.
