CMYK Engineering

The company started as an independent service center for grand-format solvent printers built by American and European manufacturers — Scitex, Nur, Agfa, Vutek — with our own technicians covering customers across the CIS.

Spare parts from those OEMs were hard to get, so a repair had to be engineered rather than ordered. Working around that is how we learned what each platform does well and where it fails, which is the knowledge everything else on this list was built on.

We had begun working with the fast-growing manufacturers in China, and the gap was ink: nothing on the market held steady quality for the most advanced printhead of the time, the Spectra Nova 256.

So we ran the first long endurance tests on the brands available instead of choosing on a data sheet, and settled on Techink Corp. Their chemists and their production facility were later absorbed by HP.

Service had grown into a market position: more than 200 large-format installations and over 250,000 liters of ink a year.

We began moving to direct sales of UV printing and digital die-cutting, which meant finding a manufacturer to work with. The survey behind that decision looked for companies designing their own control boards and firmware, and for the software teams behind them — i-cut and AD/CAD for cutting, CCD camera software, ColorGATE, Onyx and PhotoPrint for raster processing.

Of the manufacturers we looked at, DYSS in South Korea was the one willing to put its R&D team next to ours and build for customers in the CIS: digital flatbeds, hybrids and cutting machinery, on Ricoh Gen4 printheads and i-cut Vision CCD control.

At FESPA Munich, DYSS took Best Wide Format Finishing Device of the Year 2010 from the European Digital Press Awards. Esko bought i-cut soon after, which is one way to remove a competitor.

Third-party UV ink for low-resolution printheads was inconsistent from batch to batch, and ink that moves makes a printer impossible to sell on its output.

Our solvent-ink background and the contacts that came with it opened doors at Sun Chemical and Sericol in the UK, Toyo in Japan and Agfa in Belgium. The testing that followed produced a formulation our customers could print with repeatably, at a price that still made sense.

We became exclusive CIS distributor of Hanglory Group’s HandTop UV equipment — sold as CET Color in the United States — running Kyocera KJ4 printheads and LIPLA KYO ink. The combination sold quickly.

Local success was not the point for long. The primary office moved to the United States and a branch opened in Europe, so a customer is answered by people in their own market rather than by a time zone eight hours out.

We were the first to fit an LED curing system to a Canon Océ Arizona UV flatbed in place of its mercury bulbs: more power at the lamp, less drawn from the wall, and a longer service life.

A bulk ink supply system followed, built to the couplings on the Canon Arizona, the Fujifilm Acuity and the EFI VUTEk. Between them the two put our ink department in front of a much larger market — LIPLA now runs in over 300 shops in the US.

Two decades of other people’s machines went into one of our own: SOVA, a large-format UV printer built from components picked for availability and service life rather than for a spec sheet. Reliable, quick to maintain, fast.

It put UV printing within reach of small and mid-sized sign shops competing against the market leaders. The same year we added digital cutters from TPS, built on Mitsubishi and Nakanishi servos and routers.

The pandemic took most supply chains and logistics channels apart, and the damage went through the whole industry. Ours held: every customer kept being supplied, and none of them saw a price increase because of it.

We also put a support app in front of customers — AI-assisted, running around the clock — so a machine that stops at two in the morning has somewhere to start rather than a queue to join in the morning.

We became a dealer for JHF, which is now the industrial end of the printer catalog: the F3900 and F5900 flatbeds, the M3300 hybrid, and the V398 and V698 roll-to-roll machines, up to a 197-inch print width.

Two more went on sale the same year — the SECO DTF, a compact cutter for a shop with no floor space to give up, and the SOVA Otus 70, the 70-inch roll-to-roll printer from our own line.