With its substantial investment in triple-wide waterless printing more than a decade behind it, a newspaper printer in south-western Germany is spending to keep the press up to scratch.

Druckerei Konstanz – on the eponymous lake in Baden-Württemberg – installed the four-tower, two-folder KBA Cortina in 2009, complete with QIPC register automation.

Now with ageing electronics, accumulating malfunctions and the issue of parts obsolescence, they have called in the Dutch company for an upgrade.

Eight new IDS-3D cameras will be replaced – along with computer hardware and screens – with some of the displaced cameras to serve as spares for those remaining on the press.

Managing director Michael Schäfer says the “indispensable contribution” made by the solution is always apparent, and years of working with the supplier have been positive. “For this alone, there was no reason to question our relationship with QIPC,” he says. Continuing to use some components – such as cabling and existing interfaces – from the previous installation, was also economically attractive, sustainable, and simplifies the renewal process.

However, new cameras for register will detect marks at lower densities, and so start the checking process earlier, allowing the saving of “a little more time and waste”.

“But,” he says, “it is also very important for us to have a very high system availability with as few failures as possible.”

Established in 1927, Druckerei Konstanz still has a logo portraying two interlocking fish, a nod to when the company was called Druckerei am Fischmarkt, a reference to its city-centre location. It prints about 120 million copies a year of newspapers, inserts, magazines and brochures.