The press hall is coming together as a meeting place of litho and digital hardware. But what about the bindery? The industry is characterised by convergence and consolidation and a significant number of print providers are running tandem offset and digital operations, but the holdout seems to be the finishing department.
One line of thinking says that there should be finishing line dedicated specifically to digital and that using equipment designed for offset will not always do the trick.
But how true is that? It’s a fair question, considering a dual finishing regime means a sizeable capital investment in an industry of thinning margins, brokered product and overseas competition.
Some businesses are happy to run a common bindery line. The concept makes economic sense, especially to litho printers introducing digital to their operations. There is compelling logic to the idea of simply adding a digital press that will merge its output into a general bindery workflow. But the devil is in the detail, it seems, and it depends what digital output is being finished and how it’s done.
Theo Prosenica, owner of offset-digital business PMS Litho in Melbourne’s Thomastown, subscribes to the theory of a divided bindery, but finds an amazing variety of digital work can be finished using conventional machinery.
The company’s litho pressroom comprises a new KBA Rapida 162a, an A1-format Ryobi 925 press with four colours plus inline aqueous UV coater, and a five-colour Roland 800. It also has two large-format Epson roll-fed printers and an Océ Arizona GT350 flatbed.
Owner Theo Prosenica tells ProPrint that PMS uses the digital equipment for basically the same 1,100×1,800mm package print jobs as its offset fleet, as a fill-in for shorter runs of the same large-format work. This enables the company to maintain a common bindery line, even if the long-range prospect is for these workflows to end up in separate, parallel finishing processes.
In the bindery, there’s Heidelberg diecutting equipment, a Horizon Stitchliner, two Polar guillotines, a Stahl large-format folder and a Shoei folder, a Sass screen press, a blister pack moulder and foil stamper. Virtually all the bindery gear is used for both offset and digital work, says Prosenica. For example, litho and digital print are both guillotined on the Polars and diecut on the Heidelberg machines. The Sass screen printer is used to run protective, anti-slip coating on the digital print before guillotining.
“Realistically, we should have something separate because we’d probably save money, but things are tough and you try to maintain overheads. If you put in new equipment, you need to make sure you’ll have constant work to keep it running. Even if it’s a digital cutter, you need to be assured you’ll be running it at least eight hours a day.
“If you’ve got existing equipment that may take a bit longer to do the job, but it’s paid for and you’ve got the operators there, you have to utilise what you’ve got. Somewhere down the track, we need to get a flatbed digital cutter. It would be great to have it, but at the moment, it’s all about cost versus return,” adds Prosenica.
Going for bespoke
Some businesses are investing in bespoke digital bindery gear. Frontline Printing in Sydney’s Artarmon is a digital-only operation but managing director Wayne Godsell is a firm advocate of specialised digital finishing and is sceptical about the efficacy of hybrid shops running dual-purpose binderies.
Frontline Printing produces financial documents on its Konica Minolta and Océ presses, wide-format work on Roland DG and Canon machines, and also does label printing. It uses a Morgana DigiFold and a high-speed Morgana Major supplied by Ferrostaal Australia. The two folders handle a range of flyers, cards, two-pass folded work, pre-folded booklets, celloglazed score-and-fold work, and
eight-page folded flyers.
Godsell points out that toner-printed jobs need specialised equipment to prevent cracking on the edges during scoring and folding. “Sometimes we pre-score the stock before we run it through the digital machines, especially if we’re saddlestitching inline. In those scenarios, we’ll pre-score the stock and there’ll be no cracking, even if the colour goes right over the score.”
The DigiFold scores and perfs as well as folding, and while slower than the Major, Godsell finds it extremely effective with commercial digital work and the volumes relating to that. “But on offset, it would be useless, it would be too slow.”
Frontline’s bindery uses the Major for large runs in which the toner does not go over the folds because it will produce it at speed. “But where it does go over the edge, we either have to slow it down and put it on the DigiFold, as for, say, an A4-to DL fold, and it will be folded and scored at the same time, or if it’s going into a saddle-stitched book, we have to pre-score.”
But compatibility problems don’t end with toner cracking. In some workflows, a ‘speed versus smarts’ gulf needs to be bridged. Offset finishing gear is generally designed to push through large volumes of identical print but digital print runs are often not homogenous. Variable printing may require variable perfect binding with barcoding and cover-to-text-block checking or variable-extent barcode checking on personalised booklets.
And then there are the makeready times, which are proficient for relatively longer runs of offset work running on conventional bindery gear. Place a far shorter digital job on that bindery line, and suddenly your makereadies are way too long. It’s a bit like boiling a kettle full of water for a single cup of tea. By contrast, a digital bookletmaker can be set up in minutes, and much digital finishing has moved on-board the print device itself.
But at the Kwik Kopy franchise in Melbourne’s Thomastown, the occasional long offset jobs – the five-figure runs – are all outsourced, so its bindery is not geared to volume. It remains flexible enough to quickly handle short, multiple jobs, either digital or offset.
The Thomastown store is a printing and finishing hub that processes work for Kwik Kopy franchises in Campbellfield and Bayswater, as well as its own printing. Justin Alexander, co-owner of the Thomastown business, says most of the finishing on short jobs is done at Thomastown, and only the diecutting is outsourced. The bindery includes a Polar guillotine, GBC creaser-folder and GBC laminator. That kit is used for processing output from both a two-colour GTO and a new Konica Bizhub C8000.
Tack on track
Since the Thomastown hub became operational, only two changes have been necessary to accommodate the finishing of digital print, says Alexander. Firstly, the business upgraded to the GBC laminator, which produces stronger tack than the machine it replaced, something the toner-printed stock appeared to need. Secondly, the GBC creaser-folder was brought in and solved toner cracking along folds. But as both machines are applied to digital and analogue print, the benefits of that investment have been spread across the full bindery.
“We presented them with the problem of cracking and they [GBC Australia] trialled the creaser-folder with us. We were happy with the results, so we bought it,” says Alexander.
Brian Evans, post-press product manager at Heidelberg Australia & New Zealand, says the arguments for a partially divided bindery are self-evident. “Toner cracking, variable data printing and run lengths all play a part in the need to run specified digital machinery. This is why customers running both types will also look at digital-type finishing products.”
Hybrid businesses are generally after entry-level kit for digital, because they have identified the need for specialised digital finishing but do not want to spend huge amounts on that side of their finishing, he says.
David McCracken, Heidelberg southern region digital production print support manager, cites Polar guillotines as a good example. “A wider range is now available, they are quality built with new functions for both offset and hybrid use.”
Heidelberg offers its Polar 56ECO/NET guillotine range to copy shops, digital houses and small commercial printers. Its ST500 Stitchmaster is aimed at both short and long-run saddlestitching applications.
Printers do not necessarily need a firewall between offset and digital finishing but they must identify exactly which processes need digital-only finishing, says Evans.
The trade option
Of course, buying in is not the only option. In some situations, it might be smarter to develop a trade relationship, with one printer outsourcing their digital finishing and the other their litho and sharing machine time, he says.
“Most printers want to be a one-stop shop and will look at offering both types. However, some of the larger print shops continue to stay with commercial and outsource digital work,” adds Evans.
McCracken adds: “PUR binding is becoming more prevalent in digital. However, high-quality PUR finishing is another area where a qualified trade binder can add value.”
However, Andy Cooper, general manager at Morgana Australia, is sceptical of outsourcing as a digital finishing solution. “Outsourcing costs impact final print costs, affecting competitiveness. Increasingly, printers are bringing all their work in-house, as it reduces turnaround times and cost.”
The way digital print is applied to paper requires a finishing process that will not spoil the output, says Cooper. Creasing and folding machines such as Morgana – available from Ferrostaal Australia – are designed to eliminate scratching and cracking typically occurring with offset finishing equipment. Cost is not a prohibitive factor, with entry-level
digital creaser-folders around $1,000.
But in shops where finishing volumes fluctuate considerably, hybrid products such as the Morgana Pro range, which includes the DigiFold Pro and the DocuMaster Pro bookletmaker, are capable of finishing both offset and digital products.
Seamless crossover
Currie Group managing director Bernie Robinson believes in hybrid finishing. The company supplies machinery from Horizon, which he says offers seamless crossover between offset and digital collation, stitching and perfect binding.
The solution is firstly to have nearline finishing, which frees up the finishing machinery for offset jobs while a slower digital print job is completing, and secondly, to have finishing technology with highly flexible internal processes, he says.
For examples, Robinson says an HP Indigo 5600 can produce up to 4,080 A4 four-colour two-up sheets per hour, while a typical small litho press will output 12,000 to 17,000 per hour – three or four times the volume.
“The idea is to do the finishing nearline, with the digital press printing at its speed, but having a finishing line that can change within seconds means you can run that 5,000-book job on a folder processing 35,000 sheets an hour, have that finished within 45 minutes, change it over and run a digital job for which you may only need to fold 100 copies.”
For example, the Horizon BQ270V single-clamp perfect binder adjusts its clamp thickness, as well as scoring and creasing on the feeder unit, for each book in a variable-print run. Meanwhile, the AFC566FG cross-folder spans the two technologies because it recalibrates the buckle plates within seconds, making it fast enough to also process most offset jobs, he says.
“You’re talking a matter of 10, 15 or 30 seconds to produce a four-folded sheet that’s totally different to the previous fold. Customers who saw the demo at Drupa were blown away.”
PROCESSES: DIGITAL IS DIFFERENT
Sometimes conventional finishing will suit both offset and digitally printed jobs. But much of the time, different processes call for a different strategy
Toner cracking
With work printed on many toner-based digital presses, the toner will crack when folded or creased, leaving unsightly marks and likely spoiling the job. Digital work needs to be pre-creased before folding, with the typical digital folding equipment offering both processes in one.
Scratching and scuffing
Digital press makers have come a long way in creating devices that can match the high-quality output of litho. But while sheets rolling off the back of a digital press may be of superfine quality, the toner on the sheet can easily become scuffed and dulled in its journey through the bindery. Digital kit makers produce machines with fewer moving parts, to reduce the odds of ruinous scuffing.
Run lengths
Long offset runs will typically spend more time on the finishing line. If the digital and offset work is meant to go through the same bindery, the offset work will cause a bottleneck, which undermines fast-turnaround digital.
Makeready times
Conventional bindery machinery takes time to set up – the makeready on some machines could take longer than the production time of an entire short-run digital job. That’s where equipment designed specifically for digital finishing comes into its own: digital folders or bookletmakers are designed to be as simple of possible – while they can’t offer the same level of sophistication as a conventional finishing device, they don’t require such lengthy set-ups.
Variable work
Personalisation is a key selling point of digital, and this variability extends into the bindery. With a highly personalised mailing job, getting the names and numbers in the right order is only half the task – they need to be sorted in the correct order throughout the finishing process, especially for inserting and mailing. Operators must keep a watchful eye on complex variable-data jobs; conventional finishing equipment is designed to set and forget, which could lead to costly mistakes with VDP.
Inline finishing
Inline finishing is popular with digital. Anything from stapling to bookletmaking can be configured onto the end of a digital press. However, when running inline, the speed of the entire process can be decided by the speed of the slowest module, and with finishing typically much faster the printing, many printers opt to run their bindery offline, fed by multiple digital print engines. Another concern with running inline is that if one module goes down, the whole line could be put out of order.
Inkjet
Another problem rearing its head with the new generation of high-speed inkjet web presses is static. After reel-fed work is sheeted, the charge means sheets will stick to one another, leading to all sorts of problems. The way this problem is addressed in conventional offset web world
is to apply silicon to the paper.
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