All About Newspapers

A User Interface screenshot (above) shows the ease with which fan-out and cocking can be controlled with QuadTech’s newly enhanced register guidance system.

Vorarlberger Medienhaus Group, an international media company based in Austria, has become the first customer in Europe to install QuadTech’s recently enhanced register guidance system with fan-out control. The QuadTech system, with MultiCam register cameras, will be installed on five towers of the 1220 mm wide manroland GEOMAN web-offset press at the Schwarzach plant. The investment is expected to boost productivity of a press that has been producing over five million newspapers and inserts per week since going operational in 1994. The printing operation prints several regional newspapers across Austria, including its own ‘flagship’ daily, Vorarlberger Nachrichten. Automated register guidance and fan-out control will strengthen quality consistency, which until now has posed a challenge to the printer as the paper thicknesses vary, most usually between 45 g/m² and 60 g/m².

While newspaper printer Union Druckerei Weimar (Nohra, Thuringia state) has become the first printing house in Germany to install QuadTech’s newly enhanced register guidance system, with fan-out control to eliminate web-growth during production, and full ribbon control.

Notably, QuadTech enhanced its closed-loop register guidance system with automated features such as fan-out control, cocking control, anti-embossing, front-to-back register control, and ink guiding. The enhancements answer the growing need for precision measurement, reduced waste and optimum productivity on the latest high-speed, extra-wide newspaper printing presses. Automatic fan-out control minimizes register errors due to web-stretch in the humid environment of the printing towers. Its development was prompted by the trend toward wider-web presses, on which the occurrence of fan-out errors is more likely. QuadTech’s fan-out control software automatically keeps the press in lateral register across the full width of the web, throughout the entire run. Register control cameras mounted on both the gear and operator sides of the web capture tiny shifts in lateral register and instantly make automatic corrections via an interface with the bustle wheels.

As per Vince Balistrieri, general manager of QuadTech’s commercial and newspaper strategic business unit, “There has been significant advancement in press performance in recent times, but exploiting the higher speed and quality they bring is only possible with intelligent, automated register control technology. The addition of these time-saving automated controls eliminates the risks of subjective and error-prone manual adjustments. With the current financial pressures on printers, there’s a heightened need for money-saving controls. We’re providing solutions that result in faster production lines producing higher quality colour.”

Actively cooled LED lighting improves
efficiency and fidelity in vision inspection

Printers can exploit lighting technology to achieve consistent output, lower operational costs and provide sustainability.

Vision inspection systems with actively cooled light-emitting diode (LED) lighting technology are more likely to deliver enhanced inspection image quality at lower operational costs than those using alternative light options, according to a study by researchers at QuadTech, Inc. Tim Bergin, John Cusack and Kris DeSmet compared the image representation of foil and paperboard products when illuminated by two sources of LED, tungsten halogen and fluorescent light forms. LED-illuminated images showed both mid-tone gray foil and white overprinted samples appeared smooth and visually accurate. In both cases there was neither compromise in inspection settings nor distortion.