Digital Finishing Personalization

Now, the wind of digital has scratched all areas of the printing industry, and post-press processing is no exception. Let's walk into the digital printing world of the post-press binding and see what's happening there?

If you are also skeptical about the importance of digital printing for the industry as a whole, then let me tell you that the Printing Industry Association of America/Printing Technology Foundation of America (PIA/GATF) has designated 2006 as the “Digital Printing Year”. .

The PIA/GATF plans to use a series of events, meetings, and training to encourage printing companies to adopt digital printing technologies, extend their current business scope, and tap into all the digital printing potential of these printing companies.

For printers who are already on the road to digitalization, their need for postpress processing of digital printing products has become increasingly urgent.

A recent report released by PRIMIR, entitled "Digital Printing Technology Market", shows that as digital printing technology gains recognition in the entire industry, people have special printing. The use of post-processing equipment is also expected to increase. So far, digital printing plants have been able to provide customers with complete card and label products, while also providing hot stamping, embossing and UV coating processing services.

Mr. David Brooks, president of Brooks Digital Printing Co., agrees with this view. The company uses HP Indigo UltraStream3000 and Heidelberg QM-DI printers to print promotional items, folders, postcards, display cards and business cards.

According to David Brooks, the average cycle time for a digital printing job for a Brooks digital lithography company is two to three days, but there are times when overnight rushing and completion of the day take place. Most of the company's printed jobs are pages between 250 and 500 pages and a 12x18-inch format. They use K-2Systems' Digicoater Premier to help with post-press processing.

Brooks said: “Before using the Digicoater coater and the new 4.0 ink, scratches, ink dropouts, and scratches often plague us, especially when printing jobs with variable data. There will be more - these jobs need to have personalized, unique postpress. This also means that we must implement more stringent quality control procedures for postpress processing."

Postpress processing usually depends on the end use of the print—for example, whether the print needs to be mailed or re-processed and whether it has a thick ink layer. Brooks Litho can apply these special-purpose jobs to glazing, water-coating or UV coating. Brooks added: "All jobs must have a control number or control code printed on them so that people can check it after finishing the postpress process."

He suggested: “The print volume of variable data printing jobs is relatively small, so these issues are not so obvious for long-lived jobs. So far, we have not found a cost-effective one. And flexible electronic control equipment."

Sudhir Ravi, owner of TVP Color Graphics, and Glenn Toole, vice president of sales at Xeikon, just celebrated the success of their collaboration. The former purchased a Xeikon 5000 digital press.

TVP Color Graphics has recently moved into a new plant with 4.5-acre modern digital printing equipment. The new press sample exhibited by the company is a Saikang 5000 digital color web press. TVP now has a total of four Saikang presses - the Saikon 32, the Xeikon 320, the Xeikon 50D and the Xeikon 5000, and two Konica Minolta 8050 presses. In order to process the products printed on these digital printers, TVP uses Rollem International equipment for slitting/crimping/drilling, folding with Stahl in Heidelberg, and manual indentation with equipment from Morgana Systems.

Michael Intrator, the company’s sales manager, said: “You need a device with multiple post-processing capabilities.”

TVP Color Graphics is a major printing solutions provider in the Chicago area, and it also provides printing services to many large print companies in the Midwest. The company attaches great importance to the improvement of production efficiency and the maintenance of customer relations.

The printing company in Windy City uses Print Protector, Xeikon's new online print protection device, which can coat the product in a special way to protect the printed product from scratching during the mailing process.

Intrator explained: “The greatest use of this device is to reduce the chance of damage to the prints, and to eliminate the static electricity generated during the digital printing process. For the short print and personalized print jobs, the printer not only Pre-production planning must be done, and the post-press processing requirements for these jobs must be carefully studied.

He said: “Our current post-press processing is to wait until the end of production—after printing and binding are completed; and once damage has occurred, all processing will have to come back. This phenomenon not only appears in our company, but also There is an objective problem in the process of variable data production."

Another company that employs digital printing technology is the Jerome Group in St. Louis, a full-service direct marketing company that has updated its equipment in recent days in order to meet customer demand for on-demand printing services. .

Among the new equipment purchased by the company, the most important is the four Xerox Nuvera laser printers, which increased Jerome's sheet-fed variable-data digital printing capacity by about 35%. The new printer can print 5 million pages in one day. Jerome also purchased its own third HP Indigo press to improve its ability to print color custom materials.

In the past five years, Jerome has used a total of $7 million to purchase digital equipment capable of variable data printing.

Luke Teboul, the company’s deputy manager, said: “We are not only pursuing improvements in production capacity and speed, but we are also striving for maximum accuracy and completeness.”

Jerome Group has a variety of digital printing equipment, including: two Océ continuous laser printers; three Danka 9110 printers, two Xerox DP 155 laser printers, one Xerox 6135 printer, and three HP Indigo digital presses. The post-press processing equipment they use comes from companies such as Bourg, Standard, Duplo, Baldwin, Ibis, and Xerox.

Ken Brown, the company's vice president, said: “We use on-line finishing equipment to process short runs so that we can effectively avoid some problems. The jobs we work in are usually between 1 and 5,000 prints. Are personalized brochures, cards or licenses, etc."

If you come across the printing jobs mentioned above, it is best to think first: how can they complete their post-press processing satisfactorily.