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6 PRINT.IT

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Stroma Limited has started printing colour editions of foreign newspapers at its West London headquarters, following an investment of £1.3 million in new technology including an Océ JetStream 1000 inkjet production press capable of producing more than 1,000 36-page tabloids per hour.

As one of fve Océ Digital Newspaper Network (DNN) sites worldwide, Stroma prints and distributes international newspaper titles to readers in London. Titles include the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Moscow Times, The Australian

and the Sydney Morning Herald. The new superfast colour press will allow the company to produce longer runs of digitally produced newspapers and expand into book printing. Stroma managing director Steve Brown said: “Now we’re in colour we’ve expanded from eight black and white titles to a choice of about 1,400. Currently we run anything between 50 and 60 titles a day. This is something the publishers have been wanting for a long time.” He added: “Colour has made a huge difference from an advertising and publishing perspective. In addition, the

technology lends itself to adding value to companies like Qantas Airlines for example. We print a couple of Australian titles for them and they go on to the seats of business and frst class. In effect passengers are reading tomorrow’s news today!” As with other digital printing technologies, Stroma’s investment makes it possible to produce short, customised print runs cost effectively and at high speed.

“A good example of the immediacy of this technology was when we had a call from an agent saying that one of the Arab royal families was leaving London on their private jet after the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton and they asked us for one or two titles. We printed them and they

were on that plane within 20 minutes,” Brown explained. Since 2001, Océ DNN sites in London, Singapore, New York, Los Angeles and Sydney have digitally printed 30 million newspaper copies.

Stroma MD Steve Brown with a selection of newspapers printed on an Océ JetStream press

Photo shows the HP T400, a big bro T300 analysed in the study. The wo speed digital colour press combine features of digital printing with the effciencies of high volume production at speeds of 4,926 full colour A4 pages per minute. This, says HP, is 37% faster than the nearest competitor solution.

Colour brings new possibilities for digitally printed newspapers

Using HP digital printing technologies has the potential to reduce the carbon footprint of printing and selling books by as much as 20% compared to offset printing, according to a new lifecycle assessment study commissioned by HP. The study by research frm Quantis looked at the potential carbon footprint of printing a 240-page, 5.5 x 8.5in monochrome paperback as a bestseller (500,000 copies

over two years) and as a classic (5,000 copies over fve years). Quantis analysed the carbon impact of offset-only printing, digital-only printing and a mix of both and found that using digital technology had the potential to shrink the carbon footprint of printing a ‘classic book’ by as much as 20% and reduce the number of bestseller copies printed by up to 22% without affecting the total number of books sold.

In the ‘classic’ scenario, carbon savings came from the ability of the HP T200 and HP T300 Inkjet Web Presses to produce books in smaller quantities thus eliminating paper and transport-related emissions caused by over-production. According to The Economist (Just Press Print, February 27, 2010), 30% of printed books are never sold or read.

Quantis found that the greatest savings could be achieved by a combination of HP T200/T300 Inkjet Web

Presses and the HP R85 retail printing technology currently in development.

When it came to ‘bestsellers’, Quantis found that the best approach was to use a combination of analogue offset and digital inkjet printing to signifcantly reduce the number of returned copies. This would allow publishers to print 22% fewer bestseller copies and still sell the same number of books. The lifecycle assessment can be downloaded from www.hp.com/go/publishing

Go digital to save carbon

The fne art of printing

Demonstrating the versatility of wide format printers,

Thompson’s Plein Air Gallery Garden at this year’s RHS Chelsea Flower Show featured a series of 3 x 1.5 metre panoramic images printed on a Canon imagePROGRAF printer. The urban garden was designed by Thompson’s Galleries to showcase the work of contemporary landscape photographer David ony Hall and to show how art placed outdoors can add depth, colour l point to diffcult outdoor spaces such as courtyard gardens. stributor Velmex Distribution used Canon’s fagship fne art and rmat printer, the Canon imagePROGRAF iPF9100, to print images on er. The prints were then sandwiched between a piece of Perspex and an aluminium backing sheet.