Offset Printing
A Brilliant Business Model
Thursday 05. June 2008 - UV drying conquering hybrid newspaper printing
Value Added Printing or hybrid printing is currently a hot topic in the newspaper community. Opinions range from great enthusiasm to restrained curiosity. Now with UV drying manroland provides another consideration for the decision-making process.
It all started with publishers wanting classic newspapers to get a facelift and have a younger, fresher and more varied appearance. manroland responded to this by equipping newspaper presses with heatset dryers, and now with more than 150 such presses sold manroland is the global leader in this field.
Applied Innovations expand business models
The heatset-coldset COLORMAN at the Verlagsgruppe Passau/Germany and the heatset-coldset GEOMAN at Media-Druck in Tulln/Austria, which print the daily newspaper ÖSTERREICH, are but two among many heatset and coldset installations in all press classes that underline the competence of manroland in total project management. Born out of the Applied Innovations philosophy, the production
from these two presslines also proves how radically they can change and expand a business model. Not only by upgrading the newspaper as a core product: new forms of advertising create additional revenue and provide better utilization of the entire newspaper production equipment.
Hybrid presses: a growing trend
Looking at the global newspaper market, the trend towards hybrid presses is meanwhile the strongest of all. It was a somewhat dormant topic for years and then it kickstarted in the Middle East where publishers started producing with singlewidth hybrid presses, predominantly out of the CROMOMAN and UNISET series: not only with one heatset web but with up to four. Meanwhile this trend has spread to Southern Europe, South America, and North America as well.
Added value with UV drying
Since around one year now, hybrid printing no longer only means the combination of coldset-heatset. A new COLORMAN tower started up at Herold Druck in Vienna in 2007 which uses UV drying as an alternative for newspaper production. This COLORMAN is equipped with Eltex Innocure UV dryers and produces newspapers including Die Presse, Wiener Zeitung and Heute. It also prints new advertising
products in UV, and mixed products with UV and coldset pages – at a press speed of 90,000 copies per hour which means a web speed of 11.25 meters per second. Thats a world record. Early in 2008 the Canadian Transcontinental Group also ordered a COLORMAN pressline with one UV tower and took an option on adding UV to two other towers.
Heatset or UV: a system decision, not a matter of faith
These days the question is when to use heatset and when to use UV? The answer depends on many factors. Basically the following applies: heatset can only be integrated in blanket-to-blanket printing systems, whereas UV drying can also be used with satellite towers. Often the spatial conditions determine the type of technology applied – above all with retrofits because a heatset dryer requires an immense amount of space. A UV dryer needs much less. When selecting a particular system it should be kept in mind that UV dryers require special peripherals, for example for ozone extraction or nitrogen supply. UV inks are more costly than heatset inks, yet in many cases these expenses are compensated by lower waste rates. The issue of waste is particularly relevant in mixed operations (one web hybrid plus coldset webs). One advantage of UV is that the web is not heated as much as it is with heatset and so it doesnt shrink and fits to the coldset web better.
Value Added Printing of Newspapers
Heatset or UV in a new hybrid newspaper press? Good advice here is already available to newspaper publishers: from the advisory services offered by manrolands PRINTVALUE family and, especially as far as hybrid printing is concerned, from the PrintCity VAPoN project. VAPoN stands for Value Added Printing of Newspapers, a joint project by the PrintCity member companies MacDermid, manroland,
MEGTEC, Océ, Sun Chemical, UPM and Eltex, aimed at analyzing the present situation regarding Value Added Printing and hybrid printing from different aspects. The experiences of the PrintCity member companies flow together in a knowledge pool with the objective of optimizing production processes and meeting the new challenges with VAPoN products. The core question addressed is: how
can one take advantage of the new opportunities and thus increase circulations and revenues?