Expanse is a new premium wide-format media brand from CWE Solutions. The offering is made up seven vinyls, two poly laminates, a pop-up and a roll-up material. All come with ICC profiles for the most commonly used wide-format printers with particular focus on the HP latex range.
The vinyls include a five-year poly-vinyl designed for outdoor durable graphics and a premier cast vinyl – Expanse Premier. Specially developed for the vehicle wrapping market, Expanse Premier is a 50 micron gloss white cast film with Micro-Air bubble releasing system and tinted, repositionable and permanent pressure-sensitive adhesive. The Micro-Air system allows installers to achieve fast installation while maintaining a high enough tack to ensure long term bond. It’s made of premium quality cast face stock with a lay-flat liner. The Expanse Premier’s adhesive system is designed to provide exceptional opacity, along with easy installation. It is also said to provide superior conformability around rivets, curves etc.
Graham de Kock, commercial director of CWE Solutions, said: “There are certain media which in the past we would like to have adapted to further improve the properties and output. By creating our own brand, these adjustments can be made bespoke to our customers’ requirements. Purchasing through a predefined channel can also have adverse cost implications and to overcome this we have negotiated with the biggest manufacturers to have products manufactured under a plain label to keep the cost to our customers as low as possible without sacrificing on product quality.
“Product quality for wide-format media in the UK has been suffering with increasingly low quality, cheap products being imported from the Far East. With these cheap imports there is a natural lack of consistency from roll-to-roll and there are ethical as well as health and safety issues that we were concerned about. CWE is excited to be launching the first phase of the Expanse media portfolio that is of the highest standards both in terms of printed results and it’s manufacture.”
www.cwesolutions.co.uk