manroland has sold a highly-automated triple-width Colorman XXL autoprint newspaper press to Herold Druck, the Austrian printer which was its inert UV pioneer. The two-tower coldset press – the first 6/2 in the country – will be running by the end of this year. Noted for its advanced approach to technology, Herold Druck in Vienna became a pilot user of Eltex inert UV technology, showing the results to visitors to the IfraExpo in 2007. The new press will not, however, be installed in the cramped inner-city premises where UV was effectively the only option for printing coated stocks on its existing double-width Colorman. It goes into a modernised production hall in the new Vienna Central railway station complex. Once installed, it will include manroland’s APL (Automatic Plate Loading) system with its robotic arms, QuickStart inline control systems for pre-inking, automatic cut-off register control, InlineTension web tension control and InlineTemperature ink and dampening solution temperature control, ensuring consistent quality, faster production and greatly reduced start-up waste. While the press will be prepared for the APL plate logistics system to be retrofitted, there is no mention of UV in the order announcement. In the double-width press, Herold has UV lamps fitted in a ‘spacer’ unit between satellites. Contract newspaper and supplement printer Herold Druck – which prints the daily newspapers ‘Die Presse’, the ‘Wiener Zeitung’ and the freesheet ‘Heute’ – has been a manroland customer for 17 years. “If being the first means having a competitive edge, above all as far as economy in newspaper printing is concerned, then that is worthwhile,” says chief executive Leopold Kurz. “More important is aligning our company to be fit for the future and choose the right technology to that end… and this is what we have found with autoprint.” He says “of course” they visited autoprint start-ups in Osnabrück and Chemnitz: “What we saw there regarding workflows and print results made our decision easy.”