News Corp Australia has chosen digital print partners Kodak and manroland web as its preferred supplier.
But reports that an order has been placed for a system to be installed in Brisbane are premature. Production and logistics national director Geoff Booth told GXpress negotiations are continuing following a tender process.
“I don't expect an outcome for some weeks,” he says. “We have more work to do on the business case.”
Booth is currently on leave until August 1 – and senior colleagues at News Corp Australia are preoccupied with the visit of chairman Rupert Murdoch, here for the fiftieth anniversary of The Australian and other business – “so there will be little progress between now and then,” Booth says.
News wants to print copies – which are currently airlifted – of the Melbourne Herald-Sun for the Queensland and northern New South Wales market and a wide variety of other work on a pilot system to be installed at the Murarrie print site.
Trade press reports have teamed Kodak’s 200 metres-per-minute Prosper 5000 inkjet web with manroland’s 300 metres-per-minute Foldline digital finishing system. GXpress understands an installation would initially be offline, with plans to link the two systems later. Kodak – which had worked with manroland on on-press inkjet imprinting systems – launched a fundamentally redesigned 300 metres-per-minute Prosper 6000 last month.
Originally working with Océ (now part of Canon) manroland has developed two systems for finishing the product of inkjet webs, one for newspapers – with an array of options and add-ons – and another for books, currently in use at Hucais in China. A system for News would include one former, a quarterfold to make it capable of processing both tabloid and broadsheet products, plus glueing and stitching.
Kodak is understood to be ready to install an inkjet press before the end of the year, with manroland following with the Foldline in the New Year; all they need is an order.