Click here for our photo gallery from the event.
Top-tier print shop bosses and production managers were among the 100-plus crowd at the manufacturer’s open house at its Print Media Academy in Notting Hill, Melbourne on 11 October.
They were there to check out the first demonstration machine in the country spec’d out with Autoplate XL and Inpress Control technology.
The six-colour plus coater Speedmaster XL 105 joins three XL perfectors with the technology that have already been installed in the market. Autoplate XL reduces plate change times and Inpress Control cuts the amount of time and number of sheets needed to get up to colour and registration.
Lindsay Barnes (pictured), Heidelberg’s general manager for product management, said: “The two most time consuming parts of the process – after printing – are plate changing and getting up to colour and register.”
Demonstrators put the technology through its paces, utilising Autoplate XL and Inpress Control to cruise through four 500-run jobs in 18 minutes, running alcohol free.
The demonstrators first ran two 148gsm jobs, then switched to a 360gsm stock before finally producing 500 good sheets of ganged-up business cards on a 148gsm grade. Each plate change took 90 seconds and the press hit 18,000 sheets per hour on all four runs.
General manager sales & marketing Alastair Hadley said: “It’s not often I say that you won’t believe what I am telling you, but with our simultaneous plate change technology, I’ve had to admit that it is something which, even to me, sounded too good to be true.”
The company also explained that since the launch at Drupa 2004, 1,500 XL 105 presses had been shipped worldwide, including 200 printing units in Australia and New Zealand.
The event pulled in top managers from the likes of Finsbury Green, Geon, Sands Print Group, New Litho, McKellar Renown, Ego Print and McPhersons Print Group.
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