A new all-colour all-heatset Colorman press at Roularta Media in Belgium was the technical focus of a manroland business forum on automation and enhancement in newspaper printing in June. Based in Roeselare, the rapidly-expanding Flemish publisher – with its credo of ‘highest quality advertising’ – made its first steps into enhanced newspaper products more than 20 years with an IR dryer and some of the first heatset dryers on newspaper presses. The latest development sees a four-web Colorman press equipped with four dryers, while the company also has Lithoman and Rotoman heatset webs. Demands from the market, “insist on even better quality with higher grades of paper,” Roularta Printing general manager William Metsu says. The group has grown from a small local newspaper publisher 50 years ago, to a multimedia group with its greatest printing market outside Belgium and a throughput of almost 100,000 tonnes of paper a year. The company prints almost 100 magazines, Sunday newspapers, free weekly papers, and city magazines, mostly produced for Belgium, the Netherlands and France, but with circulation in Germany, Norway, and Spain. Highest-circulation products are the freesheet ‘De Streekkrant’ with three million copies and the free Sunday newspaper ‘De Zondag’ which is a tabloid distributed through bakers’ shops and has a print run of up to 630,000 copies. Metsu says the aim, “particularly for the city and Sunday newspapers is to produce them in the highest colour quality on high-grade papers.” Advertising customers will pay more for higher colour quality and superior paper. The group also plans to print as many as possible of the magazines it acquired with the takeover of the French Groupe L’Express – L’Expansion in 2006. A 100 million Euros (A$175 million) investment in 2007 provided a new 22,000 m2 presshall into which the Colorman, a 72-page Lithoman and a 16-page Rotoman with a UV coating tower for cover printing are installed. The Colorman can produce 128 full-colour tabloid pages or equivalent at 43,000 cph collect. Metsu says the Colorman produces heatset quality which is “almost the same” as the group’s dedicated heatset presses, on glossy or SC stocks. An option is to produce 96 ‘half-tabloid’ pages via a newly developed coldset-heatset folder – based on Lithoman technology – with a chopper fold (magnetic brake) at maximum press speed. A PPL plate loading system changes 14,000 plates a week automatically. Production manager Peter Leroy says “productivity and no adventures” was behind the choice and specification of the press which runs 141 hours a week in four shifts. manroland webfed sales executive vice president Peter Kuisle says newspapers are faced with two special challenges: “Newspapers in future will become more like magazines, and in the media competition the focus must be on cost per copy. “This requires flexible press concepts – for smaller formats, for different papers, for special color effects,” he says. Besides newspaper heatset, coldset commercial and UV printing is in demand all over the world. manroland’s Anton Hamm explained the new ‘One Touch’ concept which is being expanded to cover the company’s entire product range. This is based on APL plate changing – with its robotic arm and automatic plate transport – and inline control systems for ink density control, colour and cut-off register, web tension and temperature, integrated in one workflow. “A lot of One Touch modules are already in practical use, others are still under development,” he says. Some 250 blanket-to-blanket printing units have been ordered with the new robotic arm since APL was introduced at DRUPA. Pictured are: Speakers at the newspaper business forum (from left) are Peter Kuisle, Lodewijk Salomons (manroland Benelux), William Metsu, Peter Leroy, and Anton Hamm. Photo Thomas Fasold.