Benny Landa, Komori Agree to Partnership

TOKYO—Komori Corp., based here, and Landa Corp. of Rehovot, Israel, announced a global strategic partnership whereby Landa will license Komori to manufacture and market digital printing presses for commercial and other printing markets using Benny Landa’s Nanographic printing process. Landa Nanography is a new digital printing category employing water-based inks. It combines the versatility of digital with the qualities and speed of offset printing, with a low cost per page.

“We see growing demand for variable data printing and personalization, especially for niche applications, which we are addressing with our already-announced DigitalOnDemand solutions," noted Yoshiharu Komori, chairman, president and CEO of Komori. "However, there is also ever-growing customer demand for shorter and shorter run lengths as well as very short turnaround times. To meet these commercial printing market needs, we have embraced Landa Nanographic Printing as a powerful solution for our next generation sheetfed and webfed digital systems that use water-based inks."

“We have enjoyed an intimate relationship with Komori, which is our supplier of paper handling platforms for our new Nanographic sheetfed presses," said Benny Landa, company founder, chairman and CEO. "Komori was the first to be exposed to our technology and was the first to share our vision. I am therefore particularly delighted that Komori is the first-to-be-announced global strategic partner with whom we will be sharing this huge market opportunity. With its highly respected position in the printing industry and its broad market access, Komori is well placed to accelerate the worldwide adoption of Landa Nanographic printing.”

Based on the strategic partnership, Landa will provide Komori with Nanographic Printing technology and Landa NanoInk, which are at the heart of the Nanographic Printing process. Landa Nanographic printing is characterized by ultra-sharp dots of extremely high uniformity, high gloss fidelity and a broad CMYK color gamut.

Landa Nanographic printing employs ink ejectors to create the digital ink images which get applied to the printing stock in a process that can operate at extremely high speeds and creates images offering remarkable abrasion and scratch resistance. It can print on any substrate, from coated and uncoated paper stocks to recycled carton, along with newsprint and plastic packaging films—without requiring any kind of pre-treatment, special coating or post-drying. Nanographic images are only 500 nanometers thick, about half the thickness of offset images, enabling Landa NanoInk to produce what it claims is the lowest cost-per-page digital images in the industry.