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Product category: Printing Presses and Machinery (New and Used, Service and Repair)
News Release from: KBA | Subject: Cortina, Commander, Colora
Edited by the Printingtalk Editorial Team on 19 October 2005

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.

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 The company also focused on six-wide Commander presses, which KBA has since put in to operation

This year, the group is showcasing a string of new products for boosting efficiency and flexibility in newspaper production.

For KBA, waterless offset in the shape of its keyless Cortina remains a central theme, though the group is pursuing parallel innovation in conventional wet offset too.

The start-up of the first 48-page Cortina at Rodi Rotatiedruk in the Netherlands eight months ago will be followed in the next five months by shipments to German, Dutch and Belgian operations of four more Cortina press lines from a total booking of seven (29 four-high towers), with another scheduled for Edipresse in Switzerland in the summer of 2006.

Newspaper pundits are keenly awaiting the inauguration, scheduled for December, of two 48-page sections at German newspaper the Badische Zeitung in Freiburg.

The start-up of the 'green' press reflects the increasing relevance of environmental issues in newspaper production, said KBA.

With semi-commercial capabilities increasingly popular amongst newspaper printers as a means to boost press utilisation, De Persgroep in Asse (Belgium) will be pressing the button on the first of four Cortina sections (12 four-high towers) with a heatset capability.

KBA and De Persgroep have collaborated closely with the ink industry to develop a technology that enables the Cortina to print newspapers on uncoated stock and semi-commercials on coated stock with no change of ink.

Test runs have produced some stunning results, according to KBA.

According to the company, in conventional wet offset, the problem of delivering a satisfactory quality and output with no time-consuming ink changes has still not been cracked, despite repeated efforts.

As a result, the coldset and heatset sections in semi-commercial presses are generally limited to the designated process and cannot handle both.

If the waterless offset Cortina performs as billed, the potential for the newspaper industry would be enormous, believes KBA.

For economic reasons, semi-commercial and hybrid presses are gaining ground in conventional wet offset as well.

Over the past 10 years KBA, which claims a pioneering role in the technology, has delivered 50 single-width and double-width newspaper presses with a heatset package for semi-commercial or combined heatset and coldset production.

At West Australian Newspapers in Perth, for example, a single-width Comet with dryers on two of its six towers will be erected alongside a Colora press line.

It will then be possible to insert webs printed heatset on the Comet in to newspapers printed coldset on the Colora - to produce coldset newspapers with heatset covers or selected signatures, for example.

Semi-commercial presses with that capability are popular in the Netherlands.

A KBA Commander press at Wegener in Apeldoorn, for example, is configured with two towers and two dryers for printing supplements and flyers.

A single-width Comet at Janssen Pers Rotatiedruk in Gennep was fitted with two commercial folders, which allow it to output up to 75,000 16-page or 37,500 32-page reduced A4 copies per hour in an acceptable quality and at a lower cost than with a conventional high-performance commercial press.

According to KBA, newspaper printers in countries where tabloids are traditionally very popular (Italy, Spain and the UK) should think about installing dedicated tabloid presses.

The nine Commander presses that came on stream at Rizzoli Corriere della Sera (RCS) (Italy) in the summer have a cylinder circumference of 1,400mm (55"), a maximum web width of 2,000mm (78.75") and can print 96 large-format tabloid pages in one three-tower section.

With a conventional 4/2 press, six towers would be required for the same number of broadsheet pages, and with a 4/1 press, 12 towers, at a correspondingly high capital investment cost.

KBA said that it is in the process of patenting a superstructure for single-width and double-width tabloid presses in which 4/4 ribbons can be split, with the web is fed right in to the former for it to run straight through the press.

There are no turner bars and it is possible to output four-page signatures for greater layout flexibility.

KBA believes the less complex version is well worth considering for compact titles and freesheets.

KBA said that reel logistics is an area where substantial cost savings can be made.

The company said that it offers a bespoke system, Patras A, for automating paper logistics, either partially or totally from reel reception to the reelstand, including used-core removal.

A new reelstand, Pastomat RC 1500, is now available for a maximum reel diameter of 1,500mm (59").

The previous maximum was 1,270mm (50") so that reduces by a third the number of reels required and thus the volume of white waste generated and the labour involved, added the company.

Another new KBA product is a seven-segment jaw folder, the KF7, with a maximum capacity of 144 broadsheet pages and a maximum output of 90,000 copies per hour.

The patented design includes two cut-off cylinders that allow two separate ribbons to be fed in to produce two x 72 pages or other permutations.

As an alternative to the inking units with open ink ducts and undershot ink knives commonly found in Europe, Asia and North America, KBA has developed pump-type units for double-width and triple-width newspaper presses.

Following testing, the first of the units will feature in a KBA Commander 6/2 press line soon to go live at Rossel in Brussels (Belgium).

KBA's 6/2 version of the Commander, which can print 24 broadsheet pages per tower, has now been joined by a 4/1 version, also a nine-cylinder satellite, for eight broadsheet pages per tower.

The Commander 4/1 is an alternative to the four-by-one, four-high Prisma for printing larger formats where fan-out is an issue.

It unites the benefits of a 4/1 press (two-page increments, half the plate consumption of a double-circumference press in straight production) with the colour-register precision of a nine-cylinder satellite and the advanced performance and automation of the Commander, with a partially automated plate change, with a claimed maximum rated output of 86,000 copies per hour (cph).

KBA's approach to closed-loop controls for colour and cut-off register, colour density, web tension and fan-out, will all be hot topics at Ifra Expo 2005, it believes.

Andreas Birkenfeld, head of engineering systems automation at KBA, emphasised that not everything being publicised represents the state of technology.

He said that every type of colour register system used today employs register marks, which over time have been steadily reduced in size.

Any mark-free system would have to be rated against the performance of those existing systems.

And eliminating the marks must not equate with increased waste.

In practice, sophisticated closed-loop controls for colour density are based not on image data or the image itself but on dedicated and often well concealed scan elements, such as grey strips or mini-targets.

The more advanced technology now available for commercial web presses cannot be adapted overnight for newspaper production, which is more complex, but requires a lot more development, he added.

To accommodate regional preferences in the newspaper industry KBA said that it is pursuing two parallel strategies.

The first, in-house development, includes a Rollertronic automatic roller setting system and Webtronic closed-loop web-tension control system, both of which have been in operation for some time at various reference installations.

The second, the result of a collaborative alliance with competent external partners like QTI, Grafikontrol and Q I Press Controls, focuses on colour and register controls.

At present KBA is working on two development projects with Q I Press Controls, one of which is an automatic fan-out control system, the other a colour control system that has been undergoing tests on a Commander press line at Frankfurter Societatsdruckerei and some KBA commercial presses in Belgium.

Although KBA said that advances have been made, there are still a few remaining issues, such as the influence of fount solution on colour density, that will take some time to resolve.

And whilst closed-loop controls can eliminate process fluctuations, they cannot eliminate fundamental flaws in either the process or the press, which must not be forgotten in the current debate, according to the company.

KBA has also entered alliances to promote workflow integration and it was a co-founder of the Printmedia Network (Prime) a year ago.

Since then members of Prime have implemented a number of interfaces in print production.

Heiko Schroder of EAE, who is also a member of the Prime committee, explained: "The reference list of installations includes interfaces between publishing and press management systems, between press management systems and the console, the console and job-tracking systems and between job scheduling and fulfilment systems.

The nine founding members of Prime are keen to promote cross-platform participation and welcome the interest many other trade members have expressed in joining the association." As a member of the CIP4 consortium KBA said that it is already engaged in a project with a German competitor to develop interfaces for embedding JDF in the newspaper production workflow.

They could also be adopted by Prime Network.

With different workflow models in operation at almost every printing plant and economic pressure driving standardisation, KBA added that it is seeking to promote flexibility and transparency amongst competent providers so that individual players do not have to keep 're-inventing the wheel'. Request a free brochure from KBA ...

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