Performance figures are emerging for the QuadTech installation at News International’s Newsprinters site in Knowsley, UK.

The makers say start-up waste has been reduced by the AccuCam installation on all 25 towers of the five triple-width manroland Colorman XXL presses.

“The system reaches fine colour – when more than 80 per cent of all ink zones are within 0.02 absolute delta density of target – about one minute after the production run’s start and maintained until the end,” a spokesman says.

The installation followed four years’ research and development by supplier and custyomer, during which time AccuCam was enhanced to include water control. The system uses pre-setting to adhere to automated water volumes – via algorithms created from the image density values of the prepress files – avoiding scumming.  

The system uses spectral data to correct colour deviations at speed. The closed-loop system scans the whole page, controlling the printed copy against a prepress image file that has L*a*b* target aim point values for every pixel.

QuadTech says its system analyses every ink key at least twice a minute… up to 80 times faster than manual control.

The Knowsley plant of Newsprinters produces over 12 million newspapers per week for northern England, Wales and the Scottish Borders with daily and weekly national titles including News International’s own Sun, Sun on Sunday, The Times and Sunday Times and as well as the Daily Telegraph, the Sunday Telegraph, the Financial Times and the Times Literary Supplement.

Northern operations director Allan Wain says the system has made colour control “a fully automated affair”, making ink key adjustments in seconds, rectifying potential production problems before occurrence of quality loss or machine damage.

“Our workflow is more cost-effective and I believe it has been such a success that Knowsley will get back the investment easily within two years.”

Across three sites, Newsprinters has 19 of the triple-width presses – each the height of four double decker buses – producing 86,000 full colour newspapers an hour.

Sistyer plants are Broxbourne in north London – the world’s largest newspaper manufacturing plant – and Eurocentral, which houses the largest printing press installed anywhere in the world, capable of running 288 tabloid pages in full colour straight.