How to find the perfect printer - evaluating a printer's equipment - Folio: Source Book 1991

How to find the perfect printer There is a moment on every printing plant tour when a visitor realizes that he really might not be able to make his way back to the reception desk without a guide through all the alleys of roll stock, rows of presses, and sprawling bindery lines. Printing plants are large enough to store commercial aircraft, and most have one or two kinks in their layout, making it difficult to take them in at a glance. It may be harder still to make sense of the equipment on display. This article will help you evaluate the suitability of a printer's equipment for particular jobs, and help you see how certain printed products fit better than others in different plants. You should be able to use this information to help you during the printer selection process.

1. Presses

To start, here's a refresher course in web press capabilities. Presses have four elements: a paper feed system, printing units, a drying system and a folding unit. In any given printing plant, it's unusual to find more than a pair of identical presses, since printers generally configure each press differently. Let's look at each of the four elements, with an emphasis on the effect they have on printed products.

The web of paper is fed from a roll, and each roll may supply between 20,000 and 35,000 signatures--depending, of course, on the basis weight of the stock, the trim size of the signature, and the dimensions of the press. Since a typical press achieves a speed of 25,000 impressions per hour, a 2,000-pound roll of paper lasts only about one hour. Changing web paper quickly is not only important to overall press room operations, but is also crucial to quality control. Clearly, we can't stop the press to change rolls, since this would constitute a new makeready, from ink levels to folder alignment. Instead, presses are equipped with some type of web splicer.

The splicer's job is to attach a new web of paper to the tail of the old so that the press is fed a continuous stream of paper. This is a real accomplishment, considering the paper is roaring through the press under great tension. Even if you've stood by the press to watch a flying paster, you can barely say you've seen one, since it all occurs in the blink of an eye. As a print buyer, you're concerned about the paper consumption and quality consequences of poor web splices. There are two basic designs for splicers: the rotating roll system and the festoon. On the plant tour, ask your printer to explain which he uses and why.

You'll hear praise and criticism for both from different printers, and this author knows of no definitive advantage to either. It's illuminating to hear what your printer's experience has been with the system he employs, and his comments should shed some light on the quality and consumption problems he's faced, and the solutions he believes are appropriate.

The rotating roll system, by the way, gets the fresh web spinning at the same speed as the dwindling one so that the splice occurs on moving rolls. The festoon system, on the other hand, pays out extra paper over a series of cylinders, allows the rolls to stop, and makes the surplus paper available to take up the slack at the exact moment of the splice. Both systems are designed to cope with the tension and speed of the paper, and neither is entirely automatic.

Each web of paper can pass under any number of printing units and, therefore, receive as many different inks as the press can provide. However, the number of printed pages a web produces is dictated by the width of the paper roll and the circumference of the printing cylinders. (These two critical dimensions will be explored in more detail when we examine the printing units themselves.) Although these dimensions limit the number of pages per web, the constraint can be deferred by equipping a press with multiple webs, fed from additional roll stands. Each roll delivers a full signature, and if the folder can handle it, several rolls can be printed simultaneously. Doubling press output is a matter of hanging an extra roll of paper.

Roll stands not only determine press output capacity, but also permit the interweaving of different paper stocks and great variation in the placement of color throughout a signature. The number of roll stands is an absolute limit on the pages that can be printed, while the number of printing units restricts the color that can appear on them. For example, a five-unit press with two roll stands can put three colors on one signature and two colors on a second. The possible positions for those colors in the folded signatures are determined by the folding unit and the extent of coloration by the printing units.

2. Printing units

On a web press, a printing unit prints the top and bottom of a sheet simultaneously so that a four-unit press has eight printing surfaces or plates. The top and bottom need not be printing the same color ink, meaning a total of eight colors can be available over the four units. We can further expand this number by using split fountains. A split fountain divides the ink supply between two sides of the sheet so that one color appears on the left side of the imposition and a second color on the right. A clear channel of no ink separates the two. Pushed to the limit, a four-unit press can provide plenty of different colors--but can we put them to good use?

The four process colors are generally more useful than any multicolored array of inks that are confined to specific locations on the sheet. But a four-unit press with two roll stands might tempt us to use the equipment differently. Each printing unit can accommodate only one web of paper. If we devote the four units to process inks, we can use only one of the roll stands. To get two webs out of such a press, we'd make each one a two-color affair, or make one three-color web and a second all black.

You've now noticed why the five-unit press is such a practical piece of equipment for work with limited color use. Equipped with two roll stands, these presses offer one black signature interwoven with a four-color one, a technique that helps extend the apparent availability of color. Production managers with tight budgets are often quite skillful at setting an issue's pagination to exploit this capacity.

Central economics

Printing presses can always be asked to do a little less than they're capable of, but never more. A four-unit press can deliver one signature of process color on the top and bottom of the sheet, and it can also be throttled back to print 4/1, or even all black alone. A printer makes a critical decision when he buys a press, and it will affect the type of work he wants to print on it and, therefore, the prices he'll charge. A four-unit press that prints black signatures is a little like a Porsche ferrying in the relief pitcher from the bullpen--sure, the car can do it, but why pay for all that unused horse power when you won't exceed second gear?

Publishers will want to contemplate some basics in the economics of the printing business. A printer buys equipment with a range of capabilities, and sells each of the resulting products at a different price. However, the equipment itself had a single price tag, and the printer is hoping to sell its highest capability the great majority of the time. This means that there's pressure on the printer to read the marketplace correctly before he buys the equipment, and a motivation to nudge the marketplace, through pricing, after his plant's equipment acquisition.

Right now, there are few high-circulation printed products that lack process color. Almost any magazine dependent on advertising must make four-color available, and the contents of the majority of catalogs must be displayed in color. This means printers simply cannot lack multi-unit presses. If they want to move large press-runs through their plants efficiently, they need eight-unit presses, the equipment that delivers two webs of full color in one rotation. As printers scramble to make this capacity available, they must make a tough decision: Do you price two-color work as if you had a properly utilized two-color press, or do you price it as if you under-utilized your four-color press?

As a print buyer, you need not always wait for the price list to sense the answer. One reason for looking carefully at a prospective printer's equipment list is to judge the fit of your job in that plant and pricing structure. If your magazine uses color throughout, it will be best handled on eight-unit equipment if your press run is high enough, and on four-unit equipment if your run is moderate. A five-unit press offers you nothing until you sell an ad with fluorescent ink or decide to varnish your cover. Note that while your four-color work is on the five-unit press, the printer can't sell that machine, at a higher rate, to produce five-color printing.

On the other hand, if your magazine uses color sparingly, you will want to find a plant with two-unit and five-unit equipment. The latter's extra units combined with a second roll stand give you two signatures, running 4/4-1/1, while the former handles black plus a PMS color with perfect economy.

To prove you've mastered the economics of printing units and roll stands, try to figure out the optimum press configuration for a two-million pressrun of a process-color magazine that calls for a black plate change in every signature to accommodate different regional editions. The answer appears at the end of this article.

Press dimensions

So far, we've talked only about signatures, never pages. The rising costs of paper and postage have spurred publishers to shrink their trim sizes, and we've seen the ostensible 8-1/2" x 11" page contract to 8" x 10-1/2" and all points in between. The width of a printed signature stems from the width of the paper roll, while its depth is dictated by the circumference of the printing cylinder, a dimension called "cutoff" because each rotation starts a new impression. To change the width, you change your paper order; but to change the depth, you find a new press.

At about $7 million dollars each, a modern eight-unit press is going to have to be the right tool for the job or the people buying it will be out of theirs. Choosing the right press dimension is especially difficult, since a press can make products smaller than its maximum size only by wasting paper--and it can never make a product larger. There aren't many magazines the size of Arizona Highways--not least because there aren't many presses to hold them.

Around the country, there are now a good number of short cutoff presses that deliver the pages only 10-1/2" deep. Some of these paper-cost-conscious presses also have pinless feeders that do away with the extra trim necessary for a gripper's pins. Instead of grabbing the sheet with a piercing pin, these paper-stingy presses move the paper with friction. The printers using these presses are committed to a certain kind of product and a certain kind of publisher. You can't stroll into every publisher's office and suggest he discard 5 percent of his page area, even if you promise big savings. But for publishers seeking every method to reduce costs, the short cutoff press can be a boon.

The majority of presses have a cutoff of 22-3/4" which provides a maximum page depth of 10-7/8". Printers aren't going to decommission all these presses just because the price of paper is going up. But to remain competitive against plants with short cutoff equipment, they may have to cut paper waste artificially to some degree.

As a buyer, you may want to know that there are about 20 times more standard cutoff than short cutoff presses operating today. That relationship will keep changing as printers attempt to offer publishers the savings they crave, but it will be a long time before the short cutoff is common enough to replace the old standard.

3. Drying units

Most magazines are printed by heatset web offset, which means that the ink is dried at great speed in an oven placed between the printing unit and the folder. There's genuine trauma for the paper and ink here, as the pages move from pressroom temperature to oven heat at the rate of 800 feet per minute. And to make the folding and trimming operation possible, the oven is followed by a set of chill rollers that cool the web, and humidifiers that hastily restore some of the moisture lost in baking.

Heatset sounds so much like an ordeal that you may be surprised to learn that it produces results much more brilliant, glossy and lively than the air-dry method. When ink is roasted on the paper, it sets up quickly with much pure pigment sitting solidly on the surface. Inks, of course, are formulated specifically for the heatset method, to tolerate the heat and to disperse properly in the paper. The air-dry or coldset method is used for newspaper and other uncoated paper products. Those inks dry by evaporation and, as all readers know, by coming off on your fingers.

4. Folding units

The press folder is the final element that dictates equipment capacity. There are two main folder designs--the combination and the double former--plus a variety of options. A combination folder makes three folds on a signature, each at a right angle to the prior one, and converts a sheet that is 33" x 22-3/4" to 16 pages that are 8-1/8" x 10-7/8". The first fold is vertical and occurs on the former board; the second occurs around a chopper cylinder that simultaneously folds the sheet and custs the signature free from the web; and the third is accomplished with a blade that pushes the sheet into a V to fold it in half.

The double-former folder is an extremely versatile system that allows you to split the web into many ribbons and braid them together. It uses the same pattern of right-angle folds, but it runs the web over two different former boards and allows the webs themselves to be folded together in a variety of ways and split into multiple deliveries.

Press deliveries can ranger greatly in signature size and color placement. Consider the savings in time of printing four identical eight-page signatures of a long pressrun, or the savings in colst of positioning four-color almost anywhere in a 32-page signature printed 4/4-1/1. In short, the double-former folder permits a great variety of impositions with very real value to some publishers.

For some products, the folder is the most crucial element. For example, a digest-size magazine needs a digest folder that adds one more fold to the three used for standard sizes. The are also a variety of in-line finishing devices, such as perforating wheels, sequential numbering devices, laminating or UV coating apparatus, and press pasting contraptions. You'd rarely select a printer solely because of a need here, but when you do need one of these things, you may need it badly.

Evaluating equipment

Should the printer's equipment be new? Clean? Of a certain brand? It would be convenient if press manufacturers were so easy to differentiate that we could turn to a Consumer Reports listing to learn that a Harris press is like a Maytag and a Goss like a Whirlpool. But even if there were a way to discriminate on brand, it still wouldn't be that useful to the print buyer. In the end, you're more concerned with the maintenance program in any printing plant than you are with anything else. Also important is the commitment is the plant to a certain press manufacturer. When you see a Mitsubishi here and a Baker-Perkins there and an ATF over there, you must question whether the maintenance and quality control people can keep up with the problems that they may encounter.

A new piece of equipment is, indeed, more valuable than an old. It's more likely to be operating in good tune, and while an older press may be nearly as capable, it may have to run slower to match the newer machine's quality. In fact, it may run slower, period. This presents some consequences for your schedule, and for the plant's overall capacity. However, a short-to medium-run magazine is unlikely to find equipment age a factor in scheduling, and, if the maintenance program is a good one, age will have little impact on quality.

Schedule and equipment age, as you can imagine, have a very tight relationship with price. The newer the machine, the newer the money that paid for it and the younger it is in amortization. In short, a printer may have to be more brutal in his prices to keep up with the cost of new equipment--a fine irony when you recall that the reason he bought the equipment was to be more competitive.

Great strides

There have recently been some great strides in press operating speed, and we've leaped from 25,000 impressions per hour to 45,000 to 60,000. When you can more tha double the hourly output of a press crew, you can take on more work under rather ideal conditions. The only snags are the cost of the press and the bottleneck likely to ensue in a bindery that creeps along at about 9,000 books an hour. The answer? Buy more bindery lines too, and stress products of many signatures so that the ratio of pages to copies is a very high one. Bride's, for example, is probably a printer's delight since it can logically take three presses to feed one bindery line.

Alex Brown is president of Printmark, a magazine management and production consulting firm. She has been associate publisher of Small Boat Journal and production director of Hemmings Motor News.

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