5-Colour Roland Press Central To JDF Production

One of MAN Roland's B2-format Roland 500 presses - a five-colour machine with coater - will be the first Roland machine for London printer Daval Litho.

One of MAN Roland's B2-format Roland 500 presses - a five-colour machine with coater - will be the first Roland machine for London printer Daval Litho.

The press is due for installation later in August and it will provide the cornerstone of a new JDF production system at Daval Litho, linking to a Kodak Prinergy Evo-based front-end system, with press control moved to an office environment.

The Daval machine will be installed complete with MAN Roland's Colorpilot system to help the press operator maintain colour consistency throughout the run.

Colorpilot is said to measure a complete print control strip from the printed sheet, attends to automatic calibration and displays any deviations on the screen in less than 14 seconds.

Correction of the ink slide positions takes another four seconds because all of the printing units are regulated simultaneously.

Commenting on the order, Allen Nash, managing director of Daval Litho, said: "Whilst we have had a long-standing relationship with Komori, we looked at a full range of machines from all major suppliers.

MAN Roland's offering gave us everything we needed and in our opinion is the best press currently on the market.

The speed of make-ready and the colour control that we will have with the new press configuration will dramatically reduce our current job preparation times." He explained that currently Daval Litho spends 25 minutes or more setting up the job and only 10 minutes producing the printed work.

With the move to JDF and MAN Roland's ability to overlap make-ready activities whilst the previous job is still running, he believes that Daval will be able to reduce the set-up time dramatically.

Nash explained: "The new Roland 500 press also fitted in with our environmental policy.

It will run alcohol-free and will significantly improve our carbon footprint.

The Komori press that this will replace is a straight five-colour machine and so we often have to put work through twice because of special colour requirements.

The new five-colour plus coater configuration will reduce the amount of double runs and the significantly faster make-readies of the Roland 500 will reduce the number of waste-sheets that we are producing." Daval only prints on sustainable-forest or recycled papers.

Thirty-year-old Daval currently employs 20 personnel to produce a turnover of GBP1.5 million.

The company handles a range of commercial print, with facilities for pre-press production, printing, cutting and creasing, as well as finishing in-house.

Daval also has the capability to handle five-colour B2 and B3 printing, supported by two-colour and single-colour small format presses.

Commenting on the order, Gary Doman, MAN Roland's sales director for sheetfed presses, said: "Once again a printer has identified MAN Roland as providing the most environmentally friendly and most productive press on the market.

The additional requirement for a JDF network means that the Roland 500 really is the ideal machine for Daval's future printing needs.".

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