manroland will deliver its first digital finishing system to a customer in Asia as part of a multi-system order.
The company has confirmed the order in a cryptic announcement that its digital postpress systems are “increasingly in demand” and that interest is “about to get serious”.
The FormerLine systems – targeted for book production – are likely to go into the fast-growing China market. manroland web systems also has a modular pin folder FoldLine system for newspapers.
Sales project manager Paul Schnabel says the customer is a pioneer in digital printing and will receive “several FormerLine modules” within the next two years. Using its decades of experience in web-offset and folding systems manroland has focussed on making variable format postpress systems including the FormerLine book block solution.
Variable cut-offs from 145-420 mm are possible, and the system is typically teamed with a stacker such as Rima’s RS 34 or its own VBC collator, both of which will handle stacked signatures or up to 6000 book blocks an hour each of up to 100 mm thick. The web travels across two or three formers, to allow printing of four to eight-page or eight to 16-page products, inline or offline.
manroland has so far struggled to get its first digital newspaper finishing order underway, with an initial order for a communist daily in France stalled. It is understood to have book and newspaper customers in Germany and Italy.