Printing – 20 years of Printing – Part 15
Printing – 20 years of Printing – Part 15 – 7th March 2009
Manroland’s Gary Doman is similar to Richard Bradley, Bob Usher and George Clarke in the way that he has been active at the coalface of change has taken place in the commercial print sector over the past 20 years. He is now manroland UK sheetfed sales director and has been intimately involved with the Roland 700 since its launch.
He freely acknowledges Heidelberg broke new ground with its SM 102, but he feels that the launch out of the 700 had an affect on the printing industry that was much more fundamental: He said, ‘The Roland 700 introduced double diameter impression cylinders, important for this meant the sheet was always under impression while printing was taking place and an end to the horrors of snap lines on solids and tints. The seven o’clock cylinder arrangement coupled with the use of transferters allowed the sheet to be presented directly into the next printing unit. At a stroke the 700 did away with complex transfer cylinders and the related fears of marking. These innovations were new to the industry in 1993 and it is a testimony to how far ahead of the game we were that now virtually all presses are structured like this.’
The Roland 700 emulated Heidelberg’s belief in the use of computers to manage press operations, but neither manufacturer found sailing was entirely in clear waters with a following wind. The 700 wasn’t’ without hiccups as Mr Doman acknowledges: ‘The press printed superbly, it is still probably the best in the game, but we pioneered the use fibre optic cabling in the press and the cable junctions were perhaps not quite robust enough for the heat and the movement of a printing press, so some of the early machines had teething troubles but these were quickly identified and dealt with’.
To be continued…
See Part one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen and fourteen of this blog – Printing – 20 years of change
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