WINDSOR, CO, August 14 – Carestream Tollcoating introduced completely integrated, toll coating services for your inkjet products, enabling inkjet customers to optimize coating cost efficiency, quality control and time-to-market. Capabilities include solution making and production coating, drying, quality testing, slitting, sheeting, packaging and distribution of finished products to deliver one-stop shopping for formulation, coating and commercialization of premium inkjet paper and film media.
To control costs of inkjet coating, Carestream Tollcoating has installed capacity to produce coating solutions (including polyvinyl alcohol-based materials) on site. The company also has established relationships with raw material and substrate suppliers to keep costs down and assure quality.
As a specialist in high-precision roll-to-roll coating, Carestream Tollcoating can provide its toll coating service for inkjet media on any scale, at high speeds and at a competitive cost. The company’s coating and drying capabilities enable the coating of a wide range of paper substrates, from thin calendared and clay-coated bases to heavy, resin-coated photo papers.
The Colorado facility boasts several features for production of premium inkjet papers, including machines that can put down heavy and/or multiple layers with its ultra-high-precision curtain coater, and a four thousand-foot dryer that can dry very thick coatings efficiently. Multi-zone temperature and humidity control also prevents drying defects, such as mud cracking, associated with certain formulations and heavy coating weights. “As a mud surface dries in the sun, the surface shrinks while the layer beneath remains moist, causing cracks to form. The exact same thing can happen on a smaller scale with heavily coated inkjet papers. If the drying rate and conditions are not properly controlled, if it dries too fast, ‘mud cracking’ can occur, and it will show up in a printed image as a mottled or cracked appearance,” explained Todd Arndorfer, Carestream Tollcoating’s Account Manager, Manufacturing Business Development. Multi-zone controls for temperature and humidity along the drying cycle ensure defect-free final product. This drying capability can also be leveraged to create products with lower binder–to-solids ratios, reducing product cost.
“Carestream Tollcoating provides comprehensive toll coating services for inkjet products. A customer needing coated inkjet product can come to us with a finished formula or a concept in process. Our engineers will work with them to bring about a successful, high quality product at a scale that allows for profitable commercialization by the customer,” said Rick Daniels, Carestream Advanced Materials’ and Carestream Tollcoating General Manager. “The combination of our product development, testing, and commercialization expertise, with technology and equipment that’s designed to run at high speeds with optimal quality control, makes it possible for us to do this on any scale, at minimal cost and time-to-market.”
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About Carestream Tollcoating
Carestream Tollcoating offers toll coating services specializing in the application of aqueous and solvent coatings on flexible substrates for display component, battery component, membrane, medical devices, inkjet, nanotechnology imaging products and other advanced materials. Carestream Tollcoating’s professional staff of engineers builds on more than 100 years of coating leadership to deliver a wealth of knowledge and problem-solving expertise in precision coating applications, fluid design and preparation, converting, and packaging. State-of-the-art pilot coaters also make Carestream Tollcoating an ideal partner for product development, scale-up and small volume products. For additional information on the company, please visit http://www.tollcoating.com.
2012