中文Some companies talk about quality. Others quietly spend 88 years building it. Zincopar, an Italian prepress house founded back in 1938, just reminded the entire flexographic printing world which camp it belongs to.
At the inaugural Esko Dot Awards, held as part of Esko World 2026 in New Orleans, Zincopar took home the Quartz Award in the Water Web category. The winning project? Brainrot Collectible Trading Card Packaging — yes, collectible cards, the kind of demanding, detail-rich, multi-design job that makes prepress teams sweat. The judges praised its precise dot reproduction, image sharpness, registration accuracy, and consistent results across complex artwork printed with water-based inks.
Here’s the part that should humble a few people: the field wasn’t small. The inaugural Dot Awards pulled 29 entries from around the world, judged by an independent panel on technical print quality, degree of difficulty, and excellence within the Esko ecosystem. Zincopar didn’t win by being the biggest. It won by being the most disciplined.
Doing more with less
The story behind the win is the most instructive part. The customer needed 15 coordinated designs reproduced with rock-solid color consistency using water-based inks. Zincopar’s team ran extensive prepress optimization and color profiling — and then made a counterintuitive call. They proved the required quality could be hit with conventional four-color process printing instead of the seven-color process everyone had initially planned.
Think about that for a second. In an industry that often equates “more ink stations” with “better,” a specialist chose fewer. By simplifying the production without compromising the finished result, they cut cost and complexity while keeping the quality the brand demanded. That’s not luck. That’s craft married to engineering.
A house built on one ecosystem
Massimo Cipolla, CEO of the Zincopar Group, is blunt about the foundation: “Our company uses 100% Esko technology.” Within that ecosystem, Esko Quartz Screening delivered the image definition, smooth tonal transitions, and production consistency the project needed. Zincopar has spent decades building an integrated environment spanning structural design, prepress, color management, workflow automation, and plate imaging. Those connected processes standardize production, reduce manual intervention, and deliver repeatable results on demanding jobs.
The win also reflects a deep collaboration with printing partner Ekaflex. Cipolla was careful to share the credit, thanking both Esko and Ekaflex for the close dialogue between prepress and press that made the result possible.
Why this matters beyond the trophy
For the rest of the industry, the lesson isn’t “go buy Esko” (though Zincopar would probably smile at that). The lesson is that screening technology plus process expertise plus workflow integration can push flexographic quality to places people assumed only offset could reach. The Quartz technology behind the win has already earned a FlexoTech Innovation Award too — a double recognition of advances in flexo platemaking and print quality.
There’s a quiet pride in Cipolla’s words that anyone who has fought for quality will recognize. “Receiving the Quartz Award is an important recognition for Zincopar and a source of great pride,” he said. But he was quick to frame it as a waypoint, not a finish line: “For Zincopar, it is not a final destination, but further motivation to continue investing, experimenting and raising the quality standards of flexographic printing.”
The takeaway
In a market obsessed with shiny new press counts and ever-wider color gamuts, an 88-year-old Italian specialist just proved that the unglamorous middle of the workflow — prepress, screening, color, automation — is where championships are actually won. Bigger isn’t better. Smarter is.
If your shop is chasing seven colors when four would do, Zincopar’s trophy is worth a long, honest look in the mirror.
Source: WhatTheyThink / Esko
