Muller Martini

Will we ever go back to long-run offset work? Is the variability and one-off flexibility of the digital press turning the old, heavy iron obsolete? If the Obama-Romney rhetoric parade of 2012 taught us anything, it's that the truth probably lies somewhere in the middle.

Fujifilm will show the J Press 720 inkjet press. Heidelberg will present Prinect Digital Workflow Integration. New features for the Kodak NexPress platform will be shown.

Muller Martini will offer Sitma’s wrapping machines, capable of commercial inserting and onserting, in a wide wide range of configurations for inserting and single-copy film wrapping for the commercial printing and newspaper markets. Sitma will handle all installation, maintenance, parts fulfillment and technical support.

Digital production presses are capturing more mind share than ever before. The in-line, off-line or near-line debate is anything but a debate, but it is interesting to note the configurations and the rationale behind them, as they vary from printer to printer. Three printers share their views.

Take a stroll through the halls of drupa and you will see more finishing equipment than you have ever imagined in your life. Most of those machines, sadly, are unavailable here on the other side of the Atlantic. So we've decided to focus on the equipment that is, and have provided a quick look at some of the new bindery and finishing systems that made their debuts at drupa.

At University of Washington Creative Communications, the in-plant's implementation of Lean production practices have been critical to its rapid financial turnaround from a $200,000 deficit to a $300,000 profit—a half-a-million-dollar swing from one fiscal year to the next.

Next month, drupa 2012 will take over Düsseldorf, Germany. IPG asks industry observers David Zwang, Jim Hamilton, Noel Ward and Bill Lamparter what they expect to see there.

Harlequin set up an in-house digital paperback book printing line, staffed by seven people over two shifts, that enables the in-plant to print and finish more than 1,000 paperback books per hour. To print the books, Harlequin selected a high-volume Océ VarioStream continuous-feed printer, a toner-based solution that prints almost 10,000 books in an eight-hour shift.

Vendors reported a good amount of interest in bindery equipment at this year's GRAPH EXPO in Chicago. The bindery equipment at the show offered in-plants some great opportunities to expand their services and increase their efficiency.

UNT Printing & Distribution has a range of sophisticated offset and digital printing capabilities. Here's a glimpse.