All About Newspapers

Koji Tsuji, senior engineer, Nikkan Sports Printing addressing the delegates in Jaipur.

Among this year’s guest speakers at the WAN-IFRA India Conference 2010 in Jaipur was also senior engineer Koji Tsuji of Nikkan Sports Printing Co Ltd, who highlighted achievements for maximising production utilisation in his presentation while outlining the technical features, working operations and commercial advantages of PRINTPLEX from Mitsubishi.

Established in 1952 as a contract printing company of Nikkan Sports Shimbun, Japan’s top of the line daily sports newspaper in terms of circulation, Nikkan Sports Printing operates three printing plants in and around Tokyo and their Tsukiji site houses the first Mitsubishi 4x1 DIAMONDSPIRIT presses in Japan, equipped with a technology known as ‘PRINTPLEX’, which was jointly developed through technical discussions between Nikkan Sports Printing and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Printing & Packaging Machinery Ltd.

At the Tsukiji printing site, the company had seven presses and printed not only the flagship title, Nikkan Sports Shimbun, but also more than sixty contract print jobs weekly. All seven presses printed two to five jobs during the day and three out of the seven presses print Nikkan Sports Shimbun at night. In 2006, they initiated a press upgrading project at their Tsukiji printing site. Through technical discussions with several press manufacturers, the company realised that the 4x1 press could reduce plate consumption by half compared with a 4x2 press. Since more than sixty contract print jobs were handled weekly, the savings in plate consumption by the 4x1 press was a very attractive option.

Mitsubishi 4 x 1 DIAMONDSPIRIT press.

In addition, the company was also looking at the possibility that one press could be operated as two independent presses by separately controlling each folder within a double delivery folder and connecting printing units and reelstands to either folder. Since most of the company’s contract print jobs were small, short-run products, the possibility of this application was significant and would allow the company to reduce the number of presses it required from seven to four without compromising production schedules. PRINTPLEX was the sophisticated press control technology that evolved to enable one press to simultaneously run two different product orders and at two different print speeds. After extensive in-depth discussions, Nikkan ordered four DIAMONDSPIRIT press lines with PRINTPLEX technology and became the first 4x1 press user in Japan. Each press installed at the Tsukiji printing site is configured with two 4/4 tower printing units, two 2/2 tower printing units, one 2:2 double rotary folder and four reelstands. The presses are operated by the Mitsubishi press control system with automation features including ink presetting with CtP interface, automatic colour register control, dual web tension control, and the closed-loop inline print quality control system DIAMOND EYE.

Tsuji closed his presentation by summarising the benefits of PRINTPLEX and the future directions of the company. PRINTPLEX has made it possible for Nikkan Sports Printing to realize significant savings in capital investments and overall running costs, optimize production and delivery schedules, maximize production utilization and achieve a higher ROI ratio. Nikkan will continue to pursue an expansion of its contract print business in medium-sized publications supported by PRINTPLEX technology.