Nippon Paper Industries Co., Ltd. (President: Takahiko Miyoshi), Japan's leading paper and pulp manufacturing company and the core member of the Nippon Unipac Holding Group, has successfully developed Esprit Coat LOTUS, a low-density cast coated paper that employs new technologies.
The new product uses coated paper as its base, and has been developed for high-grade printing and for use as magazine cover pages. The degree of brightness is much higher compared with that of conventional products, and visual reproducibility has been substantially improved.
The product completes the line-up of low-density paper manufactured by Nippon Paper Industries Co., Ltd. This lineup now encompasses all types of printing and publishing needs, from mechanical papers used for magazine text to cast coated paper, the highest grade of coated paper.
Esprit Coat LOTUS, the world's first low-density cast coated paper, will be released in September.

<Main Features>
(1) Lighter weight
The advanced low-density technologies of Nippon Paper Industries have been applied to the cast coated paper, reducing the weight of the product by about 10%.

(2) Innovative manufacturing method
A cast surface of extremely high gloss can be formed on cast coated paper by drying the wet coated surface on the surface of a metal drum called a cast drum.
By fundamentally revising the base paper, coating formula and manufacturing conditions, we have successfully created a cast surface of unprecedented gloss and smoothness for Esprit Coat LOTUS.

(3) High degree of gloss after printing
With conventional paper, the degree of gloss on the printed cast surface tends to be lower than that of the unprinted white space, because the degree of gloss on a cast surface is extremely high.
Esprit Coat LOTUS maintains the same degree of gloss as that of its unprinted white space even after printing, and ink adhesion is also excellent. More delicate reproduction is now possible, leading to higher grade prints.

(4) High glossiness on the rear also
~coating surface for higher advertisement value~
With conventional technologies, it was not possible to produce a rear coated surface of a quality comparable with that of high-grade coated paper.
Esprit Coat LOTUS has, however, achieved a first with excellent coated surface on the rear side with a similar degree of gloss to that found on high-grade coated paper. It has done this by preventing degradation of the rear of the paper during the drying process, thereby enhancing the gloss on the rear of the coated surface by about 20% over that of conventional products.
Consequently, printing quality almost equal to that of frontispiece pages can now be attained on the rear of magazine covers. Esprit Coat LOTUS is therefore ideal for advertisements that cover both the inside cover page and the frontispiece page.

<Cast coated paper>
Cast coated paper is an excellent printing paper with a very glossy and smooth surface. The paper is manufactured using a special coating facility called a cast coater.
Based on its purpose, the base paper for cast coated paper is categorized into coated paper (used, for example, for magazine covers), woodfree paper (used for shopping bags, among other applications) and paperboards (used for packaging). The cast surface is usually made on one side only.