Power up your press

Take a look at that new Lithrone, Roland or Speedmaster in your vendor’s showroom. You will probably view one or two at Ipex. It’s not your dad’s press. Litho technology has come a long way, with more bells and whistles than an amusement arcade.

For Peter Bounas, sales manager at Sydney commercial printer MacDonald & Masterson, today’s offset technology is an invaluable resource, enabling the company to achieve its “single bottom line”.

MacDonald & Masterson, with a staff of 25, is focused on printing its premium marketing collateral as a discipline that has less to do with print craft than with efficient manufacturing, says Bounas. The Botany-based company is keen to remove ‘stop-start’, craft-type processes from its workflow. He speaks of combining efficiencies in pre-press, the pressroom and the bindery.

In the pressroom, straight machines are making room for an increasing number of long perfectors. Fixed or super-perfectors are also making their mark, says Ferrostaal’s Komori specialist, Gerard Wintle. For example, the Lithrone LS540SP can run any combination of upper and lower units. 

Its only limitation is it can print a maximum of, say, five colours per side in a five-over-five configuration. But he says Australian perfecting presses would rarely need to exceed that number of colours.

Bounas points to Heidelberg’s Alcolor dampening on its Speedmasters, which provides uniform dampening and a stable ink/water solution as a productivity enhancer, as it produces saleable colour on a shorter makeready. 

“Colour on a few sheets helps offset producers compete with digital in small-run work. That technology needs to be rolled across to half-size and 40in presses,” says Bounas.

Inline colour control using spectrophotometry can be spec’d on Komoris, Ryobis and Heidelbergs if printers are prepared to make the investment. 

“I think it’s a good feature to have,” says Bounas. He is also impressed by inline sheet inspection on the Ryobi 102 press.

But David Peck, founder and managing director of AT&M Group in Launceston, believes ‘bells and whistles’, such as inline colour control and sheet inspection, often gather dust, figuratively speaking. He asks: “What’s the purpose of buying the extras, which add to the price of the press, if they’re not being regularly used?”

Another increasingly practical tool is offset/digital interchange in a single workflow. This gives printers a choice of CTP or digital outputs from files in an era when many commercial pressrooms have both types of technology. 

At AT&M, the company’s five-colour Speedmaster and a smaller A3 press are integrated with Xerox devices, including a 700 that Peck first saw at Drupa 2008. It was one of the first installed in Tasmania via a common workflow.

The equipment supports the company’s 14-year-long strategy of diversifying. What began as Sprinta Printing, an offset venture 28 years ago, is now an offset-digital facility, mailing house, web development bureau and ad agency, branded AT&M, which stands for ‘Artistic, Talented and Motivated’.

“An integrated workflow gives us the flexibility of switching our jobs around. For example, if a client needs 20,000 booklets, we can give them, say, 100 digital the same day for their immediate requirements. The fact that we use a good MIS [Prism] gives us added flexibility.” 

Going hybrid

Initially, going hybrid in the workflow presented imposition challenges but after some experimentation, AT&M can now impose from the one software for both litho and digital. Michael Schulz, managing director of SOS Printing in Sydney says he shuffles jobs. A 500-run on a digital machine can be sent to offset if the digital press is flat-chat. SOS has two production planners, for offset and for digital, who decide how jobs will be imposed on SOS’s Fuji Celebra workflow. Generally the decision is made before the paper is ordered, but even then there is flexibility.

At book printer Ligare, files can be interchanged from manrolands and Speedmasters to Océ machines – a CS9000 and CS620 for colour, a 6250 for mono sheetfed and a 7450 mono web. The offset/digital junction sits on a Kodak Prinergy workflow. The result is less labour-intensive customisation and double handling.

One printer looking for a hybrid solution is Melbourne printer Stephen Norgate. He was getting ready to pack his bags for Ipex when ProPrint spoke with him. Norgate is in the market for a digital production press but also wants a hybrid workflow to integrate with his Speedmasters.

Norgate’s business, McKellar Renown Press, located at Carnegie in southeastern Melbourne, is a colour-managed outfit with ISO 12647-2 accreditation from Fogra, and its Heidelberg Prinect suite (via Calibration Toolbox and Colour Toolbox) is an effective offline solution for ‘on-the-fly’ colour adjustment. 

But the McKellar Renown co-director believes the next wave will be highly advanced inline colour control on press. He predicts it will soon be so advanced it will allow the operator to adjust the colour every few impressions, instead of lagging “300 sheets behind the adjustments”.

Some of the most advanced technology currently on the market will be at Heidelberg’s Ipex booth. The German giant will be showcasing inline colour measuring and control innovations in Prinect, branded ‘Image Control’ and ‘Inpress Control’ (the latter for the Speedmaster SM 102 and CD 102), which further boost colour management. They’ve both been around for a number
of years, but remain at the forefront of inline colour control.

David Peck and three others from AT&M are making the trip to Ipex. He tells ProPrint he expects the newest sheetfed models to reduce makereadies even further, as well as boasting lots of inline inspection technology. But he confesses that just like his counterparts at McKellar Renown, he and his colleagues are more intent on checking out the digital kit. Are they trying to tell us something? It’s going to take some groundbreaking announcements from the offset halls to shake people’s gaze from developments in digital in Birmingham.

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