Sheetfed Offset Technology: Still a Necessity

Although digital technology has gotten a lot of attention in recent years, partly due to increased adoption rates, advancements in offset technology have not slowed. In fact, offset technology has continued to evolve in much the same way as digital technology, and in some cases it rivals the advantages that digital offers, offering shortened makeready and turnaround times.

“Today's Speedmaster offset press is a digital press that happens to transfer ink in an offset method,” Clarence Penge, president of Heidelberg North America, said in an email.

The new Speedmaster XL 106 8-P features Plate to Unit, a fully automated printing plate logistics system. | Credit: Heidelberg

Chris Manley, president of Graphco, points out that offset has really progressed alongside digital.

“Offset has not just sat still,” he says. “While digital has gone from toner-based products being 98% of the volume to now inkjet starting to become 20% or 30% of the digital world's volume — and all these other different innovations that happen with digital — the offset folks have also continued to evolve.”

Some offset manufacturers have adopted a similar mindset, pointing out that advancements are not limited on one side of the analog/digital coin.

“We are developing offset with as much effort as we're developing digital,” Lance Martin, vice president of product marketing at Komori America, says. “We believe both technologies will be the right solution for most commercial printers.”

Of course, choosing sheetfed offset over digital — or vice versa — depends on the job.

“The world is not just ultra-short runs of 200, although we'd like to believe that,” Eric Frank, senior vice president of marketing and product management at Koenig & Bauer, explains. “… You have greater flexibility and reduced cost with offset. But if you need versioning, track and trace, you have fulfillment things that you want to address, then digital certainly has its place.”

Meeting Industry Needs

One of the biggest hurdles offset faces that digital can easily jump is customer demands for quicker turnaround times and shorter runs.

At Heidelberg, the key is to make its offset presses as digital as possible.

“Everything about the press is digitized, and our Push to Stop manufacturing approach drives output regardless of skill set,” Penge says. “This reduces waste, improves quality and consistency, and helps keep pace with your customers’ needs.”

The RMGT 970 long perfector press includes the company’s Autonomous Smart Assist Printing (ASAP) System, which helps cut makeready waste. Here, the team at Inland Press stands with the one at its Detroit, Michigan, facility. | Credit: RMGT

Other approaches to shortening run lengths and expediting turnarounds have been more targeted. For instance, RMGT’s Autonomous Smart Assist Printing (ASAP) System, unveiled at drupa last year and offered by Graphco, brings huge savings to the makeready process.

“We probably only waste somewhere between 25 and 100 sheets of paper while we're going from startup to industry-standard print quality,” Manley says. “That's a huge change from a lot of the older equipment that we've replaced the past 10 years that might have used 500 to 700 sheets to do a makeready.”

Cutting makeready time shortens production as a whole, therefore making short-run jobs more cost effective.

“We've closed that gap where it used to be that you couldn't even start considering to be competitive with offset on short runs until you got well into the thousands,” Martin says, noting that offset equipment can now efficiently accommodate runs of as few as 500 sheets.

At Manroland, stacking tasks and leveraging automation are cutting makeready times.

“Where we've been focusing efforts is how many of those processes can be done simultaneously now,” Scott Brown, national accounts director and regional sales manager at Manroland, says. “Instead of 15 minutes or 20 minutes of sequentially spaced out tasks, now we're looking at: Can we do all of those same tasks — and some of them simultaneously — in five minutes?”

Color management has also been a huge opportunity for offset innovation. For instance, Manroland developed its automated InlineColorPilot color control system.

“That allows the printer to be able to start their makeready, and while they're printing their makeready sheets … the press is automatically drawing the color to the desired targets,” Brown says.

The Roland 907 LVV Evolution features the InlineColorPilot color measurement system, which helps streamline and reduce time spent on makeready. | Credit: Manroland

Another piece of the puzzle is speeding up the presses themselves.

“There's a bit of a misnomer that it's a slow, old process,” Frank says. “That can be true if your technology's old. It's like getting into a car that's 10 years old and expecting it to have the same features and functionality as a brand-new car.” Now, offset presses are topping 20,000 sheets per hour.

Offset is also meeting the challenges posed by industry-wide convergence. For commercial printers, convergence means moving into new segments, such as wide-format and packaging.

“We see a lot of [commercial printers] that are looking to broaden their footprint in the market of sales, so they want to go outside and get jobs that are not necessarily in the commercial print business,” Martin says. “Maybe they're in packaging, maybe they're not even on paper. All of our presses that have UV and LED-UV ink capabilities on them and coating capabilities can print on non-paper substrates. You can do amazing things with synthetics, and Tyvec, and all those other products out there. It just widens that ability to print on nearly anything, and offset's always been that way.”

Automation and AI

Automation and artificial intelligence (AI) are a major part of how OEMs are addressing industry challenges, from meeting customer demands to filling gaps left by staffing shortages. As Heidelberg’s Penge mentioned, the company’s Push to Stop solution is one useful automation tool.

“Push to Stop manufacturing with features like CutStar and Plate to Unit makes an eight-color perfector with coating unit a one-man machine today,” Penge said via email. “This automation allows for many short-run jobs to be processed, and depending on run length, this would be 6,000 makereadies per month — or viewed another way, 48,000 plate changes per month.”

Automation with the CutStar reel sheeter enables printers to change 200 rolls per month while cutting manual changeover time, driving net output. | Credit: Heidelberg

In terms of combating staffing challenges, Komori has built its KHS-AI right into the press control system. This helps simplify the responsibilities of press operators, enabling print service providers (PSPs) to rely on fewer skilled operators.

“The offset process has hundreds of variables to make it work,” Martin says. “We're giving the press as much intelligence as it can, and we've also included AI into running that process and making fewer decisions on the part of the operator.”

Komori Info-Service Display (KID) enables the press operator to view vital press information in one place. | Credit: Komori

Automation is also helping press operators make decisions about job sequencing and makeready structuring.

“Let's say we have 20 jobs to run today,” Brown says. “How do I group those jobs to be the most efficient so that I'm not changing stock unnecessarily … ? Manroland is using some intelligent processes to line those up in the most expedient way to give the pressmen the opportunity to choose recommended groupings.”

Brown explains that the operators are able to see which recommendations are most efficient and pick the one that works best for their workflow.

Sustainability in Sheetfed Offset

While streamlining production is a top priority across the industry, another hot topic is sustainability.

In the case of RMGT, not only is its long perfector press beating out the older offset presses it’s replacing in terms of speed, it’s also using less energy.

“Most of the legacy equipment out there is single-sided,” Manley says. “So if, for example, you were going to run 15,000, 16-page brochures the old way, that press would have to run 15,000 sheets for side A, then turn it back around and run 15,000 sheets for side B. On our machines, we would run both sides of the sheet in one pass, so that same 15,000 run would only have to go through the machine once — and it does it at a 30% energy reduction. The math there indicates that, basically, we're pushing 70% of the energy usage out of that operation because it's only one pass instead of two, and we do it at a lower energy cost.”

Komori has also focused on reducing waste and energy consumption.

“We've instituted systems that now take less power,” Martin says. “We changed the ink train; we’ve changed the way air is delivered to the press. We've changed the way the roller settings are in the machine to make it work better and have less power, and consequently we have less waste going on the skid. That's good for the environment because you use less paper overall.”

Frank points to Koenig & Bauer’s VisuEnergy X solution, which helps PSPs manage the efficiency of their energy usage by evaluating the energy consumption of each job and identifying the most efficient time to run it.

Koenig & Bauer’s Rapida 106 X runs at 20,000 sheets per hour. | Credit: Koenig & Bauer

LED curing is another energy-saving innovation in the offset world.

“Maybe 10% or 15% of printing presses had UV on them 20 years ago,” Brown says. “Today, it's completely inverse. Eighty-plus percent of machines have UV — and in particular perfecting presses where we're printing both sides of the sheet in one pass.”

Using LED curing has led to some other benefits, Manley adds.

“The sheets come out of the press completely dry and ready for downstream processing,” he says. “By the way, they have zero VOCs [volatile organic compounds], so from a health and safety standpoint, LED makes a sheetfed offset press every bit as environmentally safe as any kind of digital solution.”

Manley says eliminating VOCs from the equation is also encouraging more young people and women to join the offset workforce — another boon for PSPs facing staffing shortages.

Brown notes that Manroland is helping PSPs cut back on energy usage across the board by redirecting the heat offset presses inherently produce to controlling facility temperatures.

“If you're in a colder environment, and you are normally heating your plant by natural gas, but you [have] got the ‘stove,’ if you will, generating all this heat from your printing press, we've got cabinets that can manage that, capture that heat, and basically turn it into hot water that can be transferred back through your air handlers for your building,” Brown says. “That can really bring down the amount of natural gas that you're having to consume to keep the environment heated. In the summer, alternately, we're getting rid of that heat and dissipating it outside and reducing the amount of air conditioning we have to have.”

At the end of the day, it’s clear offset printers are stepping up to the needs of the industry.

“There's old thoughts that print is dead, and old thoughts that offset’s dead and you’ll never sell another offset press again, and digital's going to overtake the world,” Martin says. “That's just wrong. There will always be a place for offset — at least in my lifetime. … Flexo, offset, gravure, all those technologies have existed before because of what they do and how they do it. There's not one panacea; not one technology does every single thing.”