Offset Printing
The First APL Construction Soon to Take Up Operations
Monday 03. November 2008 - A status report from Osnabrück
Precisely one year ago at the IFRA Expo 2007 in Vienna, the publishing house of the German daily newspaper, the Neue Osnabrücker Zeitung, chose to purchase a COLORMAN printing press by manroland.
The main reasons for the choice were the extremely short implementation time and the advantages of automatic plate change. The press will start operating in November 2008. What has happened so far?
By the end of 2008, one of Germanys elite newspapers, the Neue Osnabrücker Zeitung, will commence being printed on a COLORMAN press made in Augsburg. One of the main criteria were the advantages of the manroland AutomaticPlateLoading system (APL), which reduces plate loading times to three minutes for the entire system.
Why is this so important? The publishing house of the Neue Osnabrücker Zeitung not only prints this daily with a circulation of approximately 180,000 copies, but also the Rheiderland Zeitung, and a number of advertising publications with higher circulations. This requires up to 2,200 plate changes daily, so the substantially reduced change-over times with APL will pay off very quickly.
Why do change-over times have to keep getting shorter? Why do we need constantly increasing automation? Modern newspaper printing has to comply with many different demands today. The costs per copy are to be constantly lowered. Regionalization and target-group orientation require smaller runs, and therefore more and faster change-over processes.
Headed fully automatic for the future
The new focus of the manroland newspaper press portfolio is on exactly these requirements. The innovations affect future control concepts, as well as time-reduced makeready processes and a printing process that is fully automatic to a large degree. The vision: printing at the push of a button, involving only one person at a single control console. With its new autoprint press series, manroland has succeeded in implementing essential steps towards full automation already today.
The COLORMAN printing couples are equipped with four nine-cylinder satellite printing towers for 4/4-color printing with the option of extending the press by another tower. This is complemented by four reel splicers with an automatic webbing-up device and a web leading and web path monitoring system by manroland. In addition to the basic PECOM equipment from the printnet series, the electronic set-up for comprehensive networking includes a PPM PressManager, a printnet system for shopfloor data collection, and a PlanPag edition planning module.
With its range of options, the COLORMAN press is well on the way into the manroland One Touch vision – as a COLORMAN autoprint press. manroland consistently bases its developments on the requirements of the market and already today presents the groundbreaking press concept of tomorrow. With One Touch, the newspaper production of the future will be fully automatic, supported by the manroland autoprint press series.