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Printing Presses and Machinery (New and Used, Service and Repair)
News Release from: KBA | Subject: Cortina press
Edited by the Printingtalk Editorial
Team on 25 October 2004
KBA - The Case For Waterless Newspaper
Production
The recent economic recession has severely affected advertising spend and thus on newspaper revenues.
The recent economic recession has severely affected advertising spend and thus on newspaper revenues At the same time advertisers are demanding a near-commercial print quality, the internet is steadily eroding newspapers' share of classified advertisements and traditional print media are struggling to attract young people focused on cyberspace and mobiles
This article was originally published on Printingtalk on 13 Feb 2004 at 8.00am (UK)
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Belgian's Take To Waterless For Newspapers
Waterless newspaper offset has now spread to Belgium, where media player De Persgroep in Asse, near Brussels, has just become the third print enterprise to sign up for a KBA Cortina after Rodi Rotatie
Ifra To See Latest Newspaper Waterless Presses
KBA is majoring on the developments it has made with its Cortina waterless newspaper press at the Ifra Expo in Amsterdam.
If newspapers are to maintain their prominent position in the media arena they must cut their production costs and enhance their appeal, according to German press manufacturer KBA.
The company believes its technology could make a contribution to enhancing print quality and cost-efficiency.
Newspapers have been printed in offset for almost 40 years now, on presses featuring ink keys, roller-type inking units and every possible type of dampeners and with increasingly advanced level of automation and higher production speeds.
Further reading
German Newspaper House Goes With Waterless Flow
The publisher of gazettes and newsletters, Nussbaum Medien in Weil der Stadt, is making the transition to waterless offset with the purchase of a KBA Cortina press.
First 48pp Cortina Waterless Press Users Goes Live
Dutch printer Rodi Rotatiedruk BV in Broek op Langedijk, near Amsterdam, is the first to sign up for a 48pp version of KBA's waterless, keyless Cortina press.
Waterless Offset Focus For KBA At Ifra Expo
In recent years the focus on the KBA stand at Ifra Expo has been on waterless offset with the Cortina press, automation modules for cutting make-ready and waste whilst enhancing print quality.
A sizeable proportion of the greater technical complexity involved is concentrated in the systems for pre-setting the inking units, achieving the correct ink and water balance and maintaining colour registration during the production run.
When mono printing was the norm the latter was no great problem, but with the spread of colour printing during the past 15 years, efforts to enhance immediacy by cutting production times have resulted in an even higher level of automation and mounting pressure on the operator to deliver a high print quality while minimising waste.
In the good years, paper costs arising from waste had only a peripheral effect on newspapers' profit margins, which were generally comfortably wide.
Start-up waste numbering several thousand copies - a level still encountered in a lot of printing plants during full-colour production - was shrugged off as the normal state of technology.
Even today, many members of the industry consider it perfectly natural for the press operator to spend practically the entire production run adjusting the ink keys and dampener settings at the console in order to compensate for real or perceived deviations from the optimum ink and water balance.
Temperature control is considered by some to be totally superfluous, even though it can substantially reduce temperature-related fluctuations in colour density and the number of setting sequences required.
Received wisdom has it that printing newspapers is not what it used to be, so you have to put up with a few compromises on quality in coldset production.
Basically there are three responses to that assertion.
Firstly, you could take the easy way out and just carry on as before, accepting all the negative phenomena of wet offset as inevitable.
However the unwanted side-effects can be addressed by taking on board even more complex technology, or you could tackle the root cause.
Here, the first step is to ask the question: 'Is this really the right way to maximise production and cost efficiency, user-friendliness and quality?' As costs escalate and revenues diminish, decision-makers with their eye on the long term are virtually being compelled to address that basic issue.
KBA believes it has done that with its Cortina keyless waterless offset press.
Anyone with an inkling of technology would appreciate that the ease with which any given process can be mastered is inversely proportionate to the number of parameters influencing it.
No doubt many people have learned from experience that the easiest and quickest way to obtain a clear, predictable result is to have as few people as possible bringing their different perceptions and capabilities to bear.
So it follows that the core objectives in developing the Cortina were to reduce the number of parameters and variables influencing the printing process.
The company aimed to do so by creating consistently uniform production conditions - even during extended print runs - by employing advanced technology and high-performance temperature control and to free hard-pressed personnel from the constant need to intervene in order to maintain the correct ink and water balance.
In an age of computer-to-plate and digital workflows, print quality should be unambiguously defined in the very first link of the production chain - the pre-press area.
That is because, however advanced the printing press may be, imperfections or inaccuracies in the originals and plates cannot be corrected via the ink keys, but only masked to a greater or lesser extent.
Some press operators are more skilled at doing that than others but none can produce a predictably good print if the pre-press work is not up to scratch.
Corrections on one page of full-colour advertisements are inevitably followed by a quality compromise on the subsequent page.
Such manual intervention is scarcely in keeping with a standardised, automated production flow.
The answer, according to KBA, is to eliminate the parameters that cause these problems - the dampening solution and ink keys - and to control the temperature of the inking unit throughout the production run.
That, in conjunction with a reduction in the ink train to just a doctor blade, anilox roller and forme rollers, guarantees a uniformly high and freely reproducible print quality in the opinion of the press manufacturer.
Not only is technology much more consistent than people, whose form fluctuates from day to day, but waterless offset, by its very nature, remains much more stable than wet offset during the production run because there is no permanent conflict between ink and water.
KBA likened the operation of the Cortina press to a giant, high-powered 'copier', and as such it reliably reproduces exactly what is on the printing plate.
Two hundred years ago Friedrich Koenig and Andreas Bauer, founding fathers of Koenig and Bauer AG, invented the roller-type inking unit with its greater or lesser number of splitting positions and adjusting keys for zone-wide inking.
Despite the associated difficulties, that inking technology has proven its performance in sheetfed and web printing.
Even after 187 years, KBA still generates most of its income from presses incorporating the fundamental inking system devised by its founders.
Nonetheless, or perhaps precisely for this reason, KBA believes that a new departure in process technology such as waterless and keyless offset should be accepted as a profound and compelling method by the world's first and most experienced press manufacturer to the changing issues confronting the newspaper industry in the 21st Century.
Although the press operator on a Cortina has been deliberately 'deprived' of his two most familiar tools, ink keys and dampeners, he has been given a good deal in exchange said the company - more time for monitoring quality, much easier press handling and maintenance and less physical exertion during make-ready for the next edition thanks to short distances and high-speed automatic plate changes.
KBA claimed that there is also freely reproducible print quality up to a screen resolution of 60 lines per centimetre (150lines per inch) on standard and improved newsprint, a clean press environment with no ink mist or water vapour, and an automatically minimised, stress-free waste level during start-up.
In other words, far from posing a threat to press operators, the Cortina relieves them of routine tasks that are often both arduous and dull.
Their skills are just as much in demand, but can now be employed to better effect said KBA.
The press manufacturer's opinion was that those who still found it hard to accept the Cortina philosophy, should work through a list of questions in order to compare the waterless offset press objectively with a conventional wet offset press.
Such questions would be - how are waste levels, are they lower? How is registration, is it better? How is the print quality, is it better? How is web tension, is it less of a problem? How is handling, is it less complex? How is maintenance, is there less? How are emissions, are they lower? KBA believes that the Cortina provides a positive answer to all questions.
Newspapers in Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands, have already reached their own conclusions and in the 12 months since Ifra Expo 2003 in Leipzig have placed orders for a total of 25 Cortina tower presses.
KBA believes its success with waterless in a challenging market climate should not be underestimated and, hopefully, augurs a fundamental rethink in the industry. Request a free brochure from KBA ...
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