From Newspapers & Technology, April 2005

Controlling color on press: Newspapers using new tools

By Tara McMeekin
Editor

As newspapers strive to improve the overall appearance of their products and continue to adopt more commercial work, they are quickly learning that registration and color control in daily operations are critical.

Increasingly, newspapers are opting for on-press tools to handle color registration. For many, closed-loop color and register controls offer an alternative to more costly press investments.

One publisher deploying color registration technology is Lancaster Newspapers Inc. in Lancaster, Pa., which tapped CC1 Inc. to install its eXaminer registration system.

Although LNI doesn’t produce a high volume of commercial work, Michael Krayer, director of production and quality, said the CC1 system has helped boost the appearance of the publisher’s three papers - the morning Intelligencer Journal, the afternoon Lancaster New Era and The Sunday News (combined daily, 87, 522; Sunday, 100,289).

Uses cameras

EXaminer meshes computer registration with cameras installed on the towers of LNI’s MAN Roland Inc. press. The cameras pick up a target (the colored dots sometimes visible on the edges of newsprint) on the press’ web that keeps the paper in register.

“The camera looks for the dots (with a strobe light) and tries to keep them in a box or window on the computer screen,” Krayer said. “Assuming those dots are in register, all it’s doing is putting the dots where you tell it to put them. As soon as we start up the press and there’s ink on the page, the CC1 system is capturing those marks and pulling them into the center, into register - and all it knows is that these dots have to be in line.”

Prior to installing the CC1 system, Lancaster Newspapers was manually checking registration - a long and tedious process, according to Krayer.

“A pressman would take a paper out of the press, look at it, go back to the unit, make a move in a wheel, go back to the folder and constantly run back and forth, whereas the computer is doing this multiple times per second,” he said. “The accuracy is tremendous.”

Krayer has also seen improvement in makeready.

“We’re getting the press up and running it within 100 papers, we’re totally in register with all five of our press leads,” he said. “The densities are consistent as soon as the ink hits the paper.”

Lancaster Newspapers runs two back-to-back FlexoMAN presses totaling 14 units. The newspaper can run 10 units in any one direction or 10 to one end and four to the other at the same time, or seven and seven, depending on whether the presses are running simultaneously.

“On a typical run we’ll have five webs going through the press,” Krayer said. The press runs a 40-page paper in straight run mode or an 80-page paper in collect mode.

“We’re basically getting 20 pages in register within 100 copies - they’re staying in register throughout the entire press run.”

Reducing waste

Newspapers are slaves to the bottom line, making waste reduction a top priority. For those doing a significant amount of commercial work, this burden can weigh especially heavy.

“With more commercial work comes more waste and this system helps to reduce the waste,” said Rob Shawah of CC1.

Krayer said LNI cut its waste 13 percent since rolling out the eXaminer.

Reader and advertiser satisfaction, meantime, have increased.

“Rarely do I ever see that we have a complaint due to registration,” he said.

In addition to eXaminer, LNI is also using CC1’s Data Window app, which lets the newspaper record data on the register mark readings and track the data on a line graph.

“You can go in after every run and look at every reading on a particular unit,” Krayer said. “If you have a unit that’s all over or there is a tension change, it helps in identifying where you’re having mechanical problems, on your press or with newsprint.”

The emergence of color registration among newspapers has spurred vendors to increase the development of new products.

Q.I. Press Controls, for example has been beta testing its Intelligent Density System for the past year at Frankfurter Societat Druck. FSD prints the 350,000-circ daily Frankfurter Allgemeine and six editions of the Frankfurter Neue Presse in Frankfurt, Germany.

“Right now we are testing each product running on the tower where the system is installed,” said Frank Zankel, printroom manager for FSD. “The system will keep the quality of the print job throughout the whole edition.”

Currently, FSD has installed the IDS on one printing tower, controlling both sides of the web.

“We have to get more experience with [it] for example with color/water balance and how [the system works],” Zankel said. “From my point of view, this system has to take over ink balance, water balance, color registration and cutoff - then it’s possible to reduce personnel on the press.”

FSD has nine Koenig & Bauer AG presses, totaling 27 towers with 4-over-4 color.

No stranger to the industry, Q.I. has offered closed-loop color control for the past eight years and Director Menno Jansen said the IDS represents a significant step forward in the technology.

“We have a markless system, so we don’t need any colorbars printed onto the newsprint,” Jansen explained.

Q.I. unveiled the system to the North American newspaper market at last month’s Nexpo in Dallas.

“There is a tremendous interest in markless density control systems,” Jansen said. “Q.I. wants to automate as much as possible onto the presses and free press operators to do other tasks. All the cameras will monitor color registration, cutoff controls, even ribbon controls for the sidelay (sideways) position of the web and also the color.”

Jansen said the system can be easily installed onto a press, with the biggest hurdle being the software interface to the press controls to control the ink fountains.

After FSD completes its beta testing, IDS will be made commercially available later this year, Jansen said.

Not just commercial printing

Web Printing Controls Co. Inc., meantime, which recently installed a color registration system at the Los Angeles Times as part of the daily’s press upgrade project, is staking its claim in the closed-loop color control space with CLC Plus.

The system places vision imagers on each tower of a press, which scan the graybar and feed back to the inking controls for that tower, enabling the newspaper to maintain particular density values, said Jim Tasch, WPC’s vice president of sales and technical services.

Transcontinental in Montreal is the first - and so far the only - newspaper to install the CLC Plus system, where it has been in use for more than one year. WPC said it recently sold a second unit to an undisclosed newspaper.

“We’ve been producing these types of systems for a number of years for commercial publication printers,” Tasch said.

Transcontinental installed CLC Plus onto its Goss International Corp. Mainstream press, but Tasch said the system can be modified to fit any press manufacturer’s equipment.

Although newspapers with commercial printing operations are the most likely candidates for a closed-loop system, Tasch said WPC’s latest customer is “strictly newspaper.”

“So I very much see a demand for this [type of technology] strictly for newspaper publishers.”

Buffalo installs RGS

Meantime, The Buffalo (N.Y.) News said it completed the installation of Quad Tech’s Register Guidance System V-I and PPC3000X at its downtown production facility. Installation has enabled the newspaper (daily, 196,429; Sunday, 282,618) to reduce makeready 90 percent, from 30,000 to 3,000 copies. The equipment, in conjunction with the newspaper’s recent redesign, has attracted new customers and advertisers, QuadTech said.