Finishing & Screen Printing

150 Visitors Flock To See the Asian Premiere of the SigmaLine

When the visitors to the CTPS customer event in Dongguan witnessed the SigmaLine live in action, it was the first time they had seen an inline solution for the production of digitally printed books.

Wednesday 27. April 2011 - The commissioning of the first SigmaLine digital book production system on the Asian continent was celebrated with a customer event at the premises of China Translation & Printing Service Ltd. (CTPS) in Dongguan (Guangdong province), attended by around 150 visitors invited by Muller Martini and HP.

According to Finn Nielsen, Managing Director of Muller Martini Hong Kong, the throng of visitors from China, Taiwan, Japan, Korea, Singapore, Australia and many other South-East Asian countries could barely believe their eyes, because: “…this was the first time they had witnessed an inline solution for the production of digitally printed books live in action.”
Complete SigmaLine
CTPS, headquartered in Hong Kong, has a plant in Dongguan that measures nearly 310,000 square feet and employs around 1000 people. Solutions from Muller Martini are already in use at the site: several Ventura book sewing machines for hardcover production and two Diamant booklines, and now CTPS has decided to install a complete SigmaLine, making it the first graphic arts company in Asia to employ this technology. The SigmaLine consists of an HP T300 digital printing press, a SigmaFolder, SigmaCollator, SigmaBuffer, SigmaBinder, SigmaTower, SigmaTrimmer and SigmaControl. Thanks to the first fully integrated, total industrial solution for digital book production from Muller Martini, CTPS can now produce printed products economically, even in smaller runs, from prepress data to digital printing and finishing, right through to the finished, perfect-bound product.
The Muller Martini Connex digital workflow system ensures seamless interaction of all assemblies. Connex communicates with all the machines involved: it ensures high levels of safety and transparency during production, generates job data for all systems and facilitates sorting, grouping together and planning of orders. These are indispensable assets, particularly given the trend toward increasingly short runs.
Live Demo of the Muller Martini Newsletter
After watching the performance of a traditional Chinese lion dance, the visitors were able to see in detail how the SigmaLine works when it was used to produce a sample product: Muller Martini Hong Kong’s «Greater China Newsletter». The newsletter was first printed and finished inline and then subsequently displayed at the Print China convention – also held in Dongguan – where it attracted a great deal of interest from the audience.