Heidelberg

RESTON, VA—10/17/08—The three factors that reportedly most influence the purchase decision of an offset press are speed, price and quality—which isn’t altogether surprising, considering that printers become subject to those same considerations when it comes to trying to win print jobs. “The only way a printer can survive today is to have control over the cost of the printed product,” says Don Bence, vice president of Sakurai USA Inc., “Unfortunately, commercial printing is being treated as a commodity today, with extreme price pressures in the market.” Bence suggests one way to lower costs is to take advantage of press automation features, thereby reducing labor

WASHINGTON, DC—10/06/08—The International Cooperation for the Integration of the Processes in Prepress, Press and Postpress (CIP4) organization and Graphic Arts Show Corporation (GASC) today announced details for the JDF Works Print Shop Live! program at GRAPH EXPO 2008. The JDF Works Print Shop Live! is designed to show attendees exactly what can be accomplished using today’s print production automation technologies. At this new feature, show goers will follow a live digital print job through production at three different locations on the show floor from online job creation and customization, through order management, scheduling, prepress and imposition, to printing and finishing of the final printed

HEIDELBERG, GERMANY—10/02/2008—Heidelberger Druckmaschinen AG (Heidelberg) will, based on first calculations, achieve sales between 800 and 820 million Euro in the second quarter of the current financial year 2008/2009 (July 1 to September 30). Thus, sales volume is less than expected for the quarter following drupa trade fair and decreased by 10 percent compared with the same quarter in the previous financial year. Based on orders generated at drupa, Heidelberg had expected a stronger increase in sales in comparison to the first quarter of the current financial year, but recognises significant reluctance to invest in all regions because of the actual economic situation. Operating result

UNIVERSITY OF California-Berkeley Printing Services has long been known as one of the leading offset printers in the in-plant industry. When IPG visited and wrote about the in-plant back in the fall of 1996, it had just spent $3 million on a six-color, 40? Heidelberg Speedmaster 102, a move that put it on par with most of the Bay Area’s mid-sized commercial printers. With 174 employees and $15 million in annual revenue, the shop ran three shifts a day back then and handled 65 percent of UC-Berkeley’s printing needs. But eight years later, the state’s budget in disarray, the in-plant was losing business

YOU MIGHT remember hearing something about the ballots used in Florida for the 2000 election. For one Miami in-plant, that controversy started a chain of events that led to the recent acquisition of a new four-color press. “After we had hanging chads, we went to electronic voting,” explains Steve Schmuger, graphic services manager for the Miami-Dade County General Services Administration. “There was a great deal of dissatisfaction with the touch-screen voting.” In fact, the state ordered counties to cast aside their touch-screen machines and return to paper ballots, to be read by optical scanners. Suddenly, this 21-employee in-plant had to produce several million

FOR DOUG Fenske, printing was never a thought in his mind when he was growing up in Madelia, Minn. Then in 1974, between his freshman and sophomore years at Gustavus Adolphus College, he took a summer job at House of Print, a newspaper printer that also did commercial work. “I fell in love and have been in printing ever since,” reflects Fenske, now director of printing at nearby Minnesota State University, Mankato. At House of Print, owned by Ogden Newspapers, Fenske was a camera assistant, shooting film and then stripping and making plates. After a couple of years, he

Prepress Agfa will debut its chemistry-free thermal digital plate, the ThermoFuse-based Azura TS. It features an advanced clean-out system and improved contrast for easier visual inspections and offers higher throughput of up to 50 percent or 100,000 impressions. Agfa’s ThermoFuse technology physically bonds images to the plate without chemical processing. PlateWriter 2000, an ink-jet system designed for small- to medium-format offset printing, will be shown by Glunz & Jensen. The system jets a Liquid Dot solution onto non-photosensitive aluminium plates. The imaged plates are then manually fed through a finishing unit that dries them and bonds the liquid dots. Heidelberg will demonstrate Prinect Inpress

The in-plant at the Miami-Dade General Services Administration (GSA) opened its doors to the media this morning to show off its new Heidelberg four-color Speedmaster CD 74, which is in the process of printing ballots for the November 4 General Election. Printing the 3.2 million ballots in-house will reportedly save the county $320,000 compared to commercial vendor bids. Included in the demo will be a look at the platemaking process, accomplished using a Heidelberg Suprasetter A74 platesetter, which runs Saphira Chemfree thermal plates. A county press release stressed that the print shop no longer accumulates toxic chemicals that require special disposal. What’s more,

By now, JDF (Job Definition Format) has sunk its proverbial teeth into the prepress and press departments of the printing process, and no one can argue the benefits of adopting this technology in these areas of print production. However, for a true end-to-end JDF workflow, the technical innovation can’t stop at the press—it must continue into the bindery. So where are we in the pursuit of JDF-enabled bindery equipment? To find out, I asked several leading bindery equipment manufacturers/distributors, and got some interesting information from those who responded. When asked whether customers are requesting JDF-enabled bindery equipment, the overwhelming response was “yes, but

GHENT, BELGIUM—August 18, 2008—The world’s graphic arts experts have come together to release v4 of the Ghent Workgroup specifications (http://www.gwg.org/GWGversion4.phtml) for automated workflow efficiency in the range of application and output environments. v4 of the specifications supports Adobe Acrobat 9 - which itself includes Universal Proof of Preflight developed by the Ghent Workgroup. Heading the list of additional enhancements to v4 is a check for missing glyphs, one of the leading causes of preflight and page production frustration. GWG’s specifications have become the international benchmark for PDF quality assurance. The free specifications are utilized by designers, prepress and printers all over