The new ROLAND 700 HiPrint
By Dr Markus Rall, Board Member Sheetfed Presses MAN Roland

The printing industry, and especially the sheetfed-offset segment, is to a great extent vibrant and dynamic and a source of permanent innovation. Viewed from macroeconomic aspects it is a mature industry with moderate growth. Mature industries are characterized by high competitive and adaptation pressure. This demands effective business strategies and suitable technological solutions.

One of the most promising solutions is Value Added Printing (VAP). VAP moves a printing company out of the tight market where many companies are offering comparable products and helps it to reshape its range of products and services. Value Added Printing is two-way strategy and the two ways are boosting production efficiency and increasing product value. Production efficiency needs effects like faster and less expensive, product value needs effects like better and different. Both ways are dependent on the availability of appropriate technological solutions. With the new ROLAND 700 HiPrint, MAN Roland offers suitable platforms, application modules, configuration levels, equipment packages and performance parameters. Here are some examples.

Boosting production efficiency

Many people will spontaneouslyunderstand boosting production efficiency to mean printing speed above all. Particularly for mass production of certain product segments like textbooks and folding boxes, but also for countries with high populations and the attendant high demand for print products, maximum production speed is basically very important. With a maximum speed of 17,000 sheets per hour, the ROLAND 700 HiPrint is one of the fastest sheetfed offset presses. However, most sheetfed-offset printers in the world have short runs. 80 percent of the run lengths in Europe in the 70 x 100 format lie between 5,000 and 10,000 sheets and this is dropping. These companies invest in solutions to reduce makeready time, and with QuickChange systems the HiPrint concept is ideal for them. Up to ten different individual and package solutions are available to save valuable minutes at every part of the press – from the feeder through the printing and coating units right up to the delivery. Compared to the values provided by The German Printing and Media Industries Federation for cost and performance calculations for an average press, makeready timesavings of up to 40 percent are achievable with a ROLAND 700 HiPrint. Selecting the most suitable maximum sheet size can also make a big contribution to boosting production efficiency. This applies above all for packaging printers, book printers and commercial printers who don’t print DIN A 4-based products. With the special 78 x 105 centimeters format, the HiPrint range not only offers the largest sheet size of all medium-format sheetfed offset presses but the largest image area as well. In many cases this format permits another row of multiple-up images on the sheet and this alone increases productivity by a considerable amount.

One of the classic production efficiency boosters is perfecting. This varies from country to country but these days up to 30 percent of presses in the 70 x 100 format category are perfectors. The trend is towards long perfectors: eight-, ten- and twelve-color presses. The reason why is One-Pass-Production i.e. one makeready, one washup, one color matching process. This saves time above all. The ROLAND 700 HiPrint offers this segment a technically unique combination: a double-diameter sheet turning system (InlinePerfector) and special impression cylinder jackets (OptiPrint) for optimal perfecting quality. The maximum printing speed in perfecting mode has been increased to 13,000 sheets per hour but, even more importantly, many detailed modifications to the delivery result in a significantly higher net output. Yet another means of boosting production efficiency is to connect the press, especially a long perfector, to a reel sheeter (ROLAND InlineSheeter) – a highperformance component of the HiPrint range. Both long perfectors and reel sheeters contribute in equal measure to tandardized production in the sense of uniformity in substrate types, formats, products (e.g. signatures), color composition, quality requirements, etc. Here the ROLAND InlineSheeter not only helps save paper costs but also increases average output particularly for companies printing foils and thin papers (label printers for example).

At the other end of the substrate scale – board and other thick materials – production efficiency can be boosted by the following triple combination: installing the press on a plinth, equipping the press with automated non-stop systems at feeder and delivery, connecting the press to an automatic logistics system that brings substrates on pallets from the warehouse via motorized transport systems directly to the press, ventilates and aligns the piles and loads them into the feeder. Here the HiPrint concept is linked with AUPASYS, the modular logistics component system from MAN Roland that can be configured to suit any customer’s building conditions and requirements. Besides materials logistics, data logistics also make a big contribution to boosting production efficiency. Two things are essential here: extensive CIM networking and integration of the pressroom with the other technical areas and production planning, and a CIP3 (better CIP4) controlled data workflow. Here HiPrint helps itself to items from the printnet module family, MAN Roland’s process electronics system. The printnet PressManager not only saves valuable production minutes before, during and after printing a job; it also makes the processes more reliable and transparent for all concerned.

Increasing product value

To leave the method of boosting production efficiency, the questions arising are: how can print production be carried out faster and less expensively? And how can this be done profitably with the ROLAND 700 HiPrint? We now take a look at the other method – increasing product value. The questions here are: how can the quality of print products be noticeably improved and more distinctly set apart from competitor products? The first way is quite simply through lithographic quality. This involves the choice of screen systems, the choice and mastery of color separation programs, and also the choice of the color system. These days countless different color systems are on the market: intensive and highly pigmented inks, special inks and mixed inks, six- and seven-color systems, and many more. They all have the same objective that is to expand the color space that can be reproduced by sheetfed offset and, through color fidelity and intensity, to raise the print consumer’s perception of the image. HiPrint presses can be configured with up to twelve printing units and can meet any requirements.

Much the same as with printing inks, substrates also keep on changing. They are getting lighter, thinner, thicker, more rigid, less stable, more expensive, more sensitive, etc. There are more and more synthetic substrates that are non-absorbent, including laminates and compounds. At the top end, new types of micro-corrugated board are being printed by sheetfed offset. Substrates are a highly technical field. On the one hand the aim is to reduce costs, and on the other hand increased functionality. Both make highly complex demands on a printing press. With its double-diameter cylinders, heavy-duty substructure and side frame construction, and dual drive system, the ROLAND 700 HiPrint has the capability to process the widest range of substrates – from the flimsiest paper right up to rigid heavy board – without any problems.

A major aspect of product value is print quality. Besides a “sharp dot” this demands the highest image, screen and register quality, as well as rich and deep inking over the entire run with stable ink density free of ghosting, and all this with minimum start-up and re-start waste. The schedule of requirements for the HiPrint concept is uncompromising as far as print quality is concerned and offers a“Quality Center”. This is made up of highly developed precision technology and printing unit and drive rigidity, computer-calculated inking and damping unit engineering, along with many automated and operator-controlled individual functions that take subject-specific aspects into account.

Print product value also includes gloss and other surface effects provided by coating. These days coating is a highly industrial process. Originally introduced as a pigment less ink (varnish) applied via a printing unit, a very wide range of water-based or UV coatings are available today that can be applied and dried inline, wet-on-wet, single or double hit, at the end of the press or at the start or in the middle, without any reduction in printing speed and with highly reproducible quality. With the InlineCoater, DoubleCoater, Ultima or Inline-UV, the HiPrint concept offers all customers, regardless of whether they are general printers or coating specialists, a complete range of industrial-scale, high-performance solutions.

UV printing and coating is another step forward in increasing product value. For decades only an application for a few specialists and high-end products, UV technology is gaining greater acceptance year for year and opening up markets that were previously inaccessible. The first question that needs to be addressed is the right investment because, depending on the results one is looking for (technical and economical), there is a wide range of alternatives which include: pure UV (UV only), mixed UV (mixed operation between UV and normal offset), primer UV (a combination of normal offset, primer coating and UV coating), hybrid UV (variants of UV inks), or heat-reduced UV (special lamps for substrates such as foils). There are HiPrint modules for all the alternatives mentioned, especially those built around the Seccomatic UV dryer, but also configurations with UV-compatible washing systems and equipment packages.

Going beyond gloss coating and UV applications, there is yet another level for increasing product value and that is metallic applications that are the classic forms of print enhancement. Known for decades as the offline processes of bronzing and hot-foil stamping, metallic applications have made the transition to inline processes with the attendant cost benefits, firstly via the medium of offset ink and later via dispersion and Metalure coatings. Now it seems that a new pinnacle has been reached: since drupa 2004 a new form of cold-foil metallic enhancement has been available. The ROLAND InlineFoiler Prindor, a HiPrint option, has introduced this process to the industry and achieved widespread acceptance. Its advantage lies in the economics that is based on the fact that it is an inline process that requires no reduction in press speed and uses an inexpensive offset plate as the image carrier. The foil can be easily overprinted to provide a vast array of striking metallic color tones. Although HiPrint stands for High Quality Printing, this does not mean classic printing alone but that combined with the best possible effects from coating and foil enhancement.

Adding value to a product does not end with the manufacturing process as such but with measuring, evaluating and controlling the result and providing the customer with guaranteed quality. The HiPrint modules offer a number of systems for this. The video-based ROLAND InlineInspector sheet inspection system located above the last printing unit monitors every sheet in accordance with all the usual criteria for printing and substrate quality and compares it with a reference sheet. Depending on the level of quality required, the sensitivity settings of the system can be varied. Sheets identified as faulty can be flagged in the delivery pile or diverted to a separate station in the delivery (ROLAND InlineSorter). Another video-based monitoring system, the ROLAND InlineObserver, monitors sheet travel through the press and enables corrections to be made to the air settings on the run before sheet travel faults result in waste sheets. ColorPilot takes care of color measurement and control on HiPrint presses. The advantage of this system lies in the industry’s fastest and most precise measuring head that scans and measures print control strips either at the sheet edge (standard) or in the middle of the sheet (ColorPilot plus). The print control strips developed for ColorPilot are not only very small (four millimeters in height) but also have the number of measuring patches required for combined gray balance regulation which is recognized as the optimal quality control method for sheetfed offset.

Summary
The technology offered by the ROLAND 700 HiPrint covers all aspects of Value Added Printing. It is aimed at those printers who choose to concentrate on boosting production efficiency i.e. higher performance and time and cost savings. It is also aimed at printers looking to increase the value of their products with the best print and enhancement quality combined with cost-efficient inline finishing. ROLAND 700 HiPrint modules can be configured to form more than 3000 variants that is the widest range of sheetfed press models available in the industry.