In pursuit of perfection
The streamlining and automation of the workflow between pre-press and press, added to the colour management aspect, meant that machine manufacturers could really be ambitious and push the lithographic printing process to the limit. The take up of these more automated presses with onboard colour management resulted in a massive increase in production output from commercial printers. We have seen make ready times decimated over the last decade, and at the same time running speeds have increased to 15,000 plus an hour and beyond on single pass multi-colour presses. This pace of output, and the ability to also produce high quality work at high speed, has led to a virtual ‘commodity like’ marketplace for lithographic offset printing. So, what to do but try and increase output even further so margins can be maintained? Enter the long and double decker perfectors.
Perfecting is a good name for printing on both sides of a sheet, as if you are a minder, it means that your workload is more than halved, and you can quickly kiss goodbye to one job and move onto the next in the blink of an eye – no hanging around waiting for a job to dry, and no backbreaking turning over of heavy coated paper for printing on the other side. In a nutshell, a doubling of production capacity has occurred in one clean sweep – a perfect scenario for both machine minder and production manager.
The advent of perfecting really is one of the major milestones in the lithographic printing area, and there are quite ingenious ways the manufacturers have tackled the challenges on getting print on both sides of the sheet in one pass. The most common method is the three drum technology, which results in the long perfector, but there is also the double decker method, such as Komori with its SP and Akiyama with the J Series. KBA also has the Varimat single drum perfecting system for its 142 cm+ machines, which eliminates the longer footprint.
At first experts predicted that perfectors were only viable for the longer run jobs, and would not be competitive on shorter run work. But as an example, Heidelberg undertook a survey of its installed users of perfectors, and discovered that only 16% of the run lengths handled by the UK’s long perfector printers exceeded 50 000 sheets, with 54% running jobs of less than 15 000 sheets making it clear that perfectors can happily exist in the increasingly shorter run marketplace.
Manufacturers have also realised that it is not only the B1 and B2 market that needs machines that can print on both sides, and now B3 perfectors are available, which clashes directly with the market that digital printers are after.
The DI concept – love it or hate it, it is here to stay.
To be continued…
Peter Harrison is Joint Managing Director of The Printing House Ltd of Crewe, Cheshire, UK.
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