Should you run digital finishing inline or offline, and does near-line offer the best of both worlds? Peter Kohn investigates.

　　Improvements in digital printing technology have hogged the spotlight over the past decade, while finishing, always the bridesmaid, has quietly but confidently continued to lift its game in the digital space. There's now a myriad of options, which can be loosely split into three categories: inline, offline and near-line. Offset printers, educated to a largely offline world interconnected by pallets and separate processes, are now spoiled for choice.

　　So what's the best option? It all depends. Do you want to turn your digital shopfloor into a one-stop shop for a specific type of job? or should you stick with a litho-esque offline set-up for maximum flexibility Each stance comes with its own pros and cons. Inline offers all the speed and hands-off benefits you could want for standard jobs, but restricts your options. It means you're paying for a piece of kit that is out of commission if an unusual job comes your way. Also, much digital finishing kit is quicker than the engine, because it has been built on technology developed for offset, where the speeds are much greater. (Although with certain processes, such as lamination, the reverse is true and the bindery is the bottleneck.) And don't forget that if your inline finishing unit goes on the blink, the entire line goes down.

　　Offline is great if you've got lots of jobs that each require very different treatment in finishing. With offline, you can operate a plant crammed with a fleet of every post-press device imaginable. But it is slower and more cumbersome.

　　Near-line should offer the best of both worlds. One bindery line might happily chew through work flying off a number of digital presses. But this approach struggles from same faults of any Jack-of-all-trades: it is master of none. So what the answer's to this digital dilemma?

　　Inline in focus

　　Paul Sanelli, Fuji Xerox's marketing manager for Printing Systems, concedes there are distinct arguments for going offline and near-line, particularly in sharing finishing lines between print devices. But he believes inline requires fewer touch points from paper to pack, reducing labour costs and allowing re-allocation of staff. "Most inline solutions are generally easy to operate as well, and they offer reduced dynamic set-up times or make ready because they can be set up from the print driver."

　　For instance, Xerox users who are looking to produce books digitally can plug their press into the inline 'Book Factory'. This modular set-up, built by CP Bourg, offers perfect binding with optional three-knife trimmer, and printers can add square or saddlestitched booklet-makers, corner or edge stapling, and thermal tape binding, to name some.

　　Most digital vendors have made headway into inline technology with a myriad of options and post-press processes. The HP Indigo 5000 can print on plastics and diecut inline, useful for photobook work. The web-fed Xeikon 5000 enables banner making and other finishing for POS work. Agfa's M-Press industrial inkjet adds stacking and packing.

　　Ricoh offers inline hole punching, saddlestitching (including square-end), perfect binding, multi-folding and the world's first inline ring binder. Kathy Wilson, general manager of business solutions and production at Ricoh Australia, says the true value of inline is in short runs, where printers traditional opt for costly set-ups involving machinery and labour. "In many instances, additional set-up prints are used to get the job right. This may be four or five set-up books for a finished job that might only be a few copies - resulting in a significant level of waste. With inline finishing, the workflow, which is integrated into the system, helps with alignment and pagination, minimising the amount of wastage in setting up."

　　At Picadilly Print, a 35-year-old digital business in Artarmon, Sydney, two Konica Minolta presses output to an inline finishing set-up. The mono 1050 and colour C6500 have one-pass inline saddlestitching and trimming.

　　Picadilly director Ian Wood says inline is the way to go with jobs where there is a high repetition of a uniform finishing sequence. "It's much better than having to go back through a standalone bookletmaker or through a stitcher that was really meant for offset. There might be a limitation if you're putting a heavier-weight cover on a booklet with something like a cello finish. But generally, we can dictate the rules to suit our customers."

　　Konica Minolta's Grant Thomas says printers have an opportunity to banish "hidden costs of near-line finishing" and lists processes the vendor can configure inline: multi-hole punching, 600pp perfect-binding, brochure folding in six configurations, saddle booklet makeready for full-bleed A4 booklets, or perfect-cut stapling for up to 100 pages. Konica's Bizhub mono Pro 1050 and colour C6500 presses can trim and z-fold brochures.

　　But Picadilly also opts for near-line options. It runs a 26ppm Duplo DC-645 bookletmaker, supplied by GBC, for one-pass trimming and scoring of jobs, such as a 20-up sheet of business cards. "With the Duplo, we're saving an estimated four to six hours a week in guillotining," says Wood. "We can set up templates, we can barcode them, we can put several jobs through at once."

　　Similarly, six-staff Glade Graphics produces short-run saddle-stitched or corner-stitched work, with cover insertion, on board its Canon ImagePress C7000. Manager DJ Wood says it is economical for jobs up to around 300 28pp booklets. Anything larger or with more sections is finished offline in Glade's bindery or sent out to trade.

　　The 20-year-old Regents Park-based digital print business produces mainly SRA3 work: booklets, posters, short-run magazines and VDP. For the past five years, it has been a part of Precision Printing, a sheetfed operation that shares a common bindery for work coming off a four-colour 26-inch Komori Lithrone and 52-inch GTO. The digital-offset traffic is controlled by its Prinect workflow.

　　Peter Brittliff, senior product manager for Professional Print Solutions at Canon Australia, says the ImagePress C7000VP has inline folding, stapling, saddle­stitching and trimming. High-capacity stackers also support near-line and offline production workflows. Using JDF-enabled workflow applications such as ImageWare Pre-press Manager, Canon drives third-party finishing kit from Duplo and Horizon.

　　Offline offerings

　　Paul Kasper, owner of Kwik Kopy Bondi Junction, runs a digital finishing line that comprises a 10-bin Duplo collator with inline bookletmaker, a semi-automatic wire punch and binder from Renz Masterbind, and a deep-bed Eurofold A3 to DL. The 24-year-old company moved out of offset two years ago and now specialises in SRA3 digital. Its fleet comprises two production colour presses, a Konica Bizhub Pro c6500 and a Xerox DocuColor 2045, two mono machines, an Océ VarioPrint 2110 and a Canon ImageRunner 5065. It also runs a wide-format Canon Image­Prograf W8400 colour printer and an Océ TDS 400 black-and-white plan printer.

　　Kasper would like to see greater connectivity between digital presses and the finishing line downstream, but remains an inline sceptic. "When utilising the current digital printers, any inline finishing greatly reduces the speed of the machinery. Additionally, we run most jobs 2-up on A3, saving on click charges, but no company has as yet offered a solution for top-left hand corner cutting and stapling. This would be a great advantage. Having the finishing equipment offline enables you to complete more jobs and increases your capacity.

　　"Ideally, you should be able to take an A4 document, print it 2-up and have it finished on-line with a staple. However, there is no current finishing solution, so you need to finish it offline by cutting in half, then the staple. Even so, all inline solutions slow the production of the machines, or render them useless if there is a fault in the finishing unit," he adds.

　　At Print City, a 28-year-old shopfront company with a staff of five that services the Melbourne CBD with SRA3-format digital print, manager Mason Thomas oversees a mix of inline and offline finishing, but prefers the latter. Work coming off its two Ricoh Pro machines, a 906 and 1106, is generally processed through a highly automated post-press line that can keep up with the machines' 110ppm outputs.

　　"Both B&W machines have inserters for pre-printed covers, and one has saddle-stitching too. We use that for longer runs of black-and-white work," says Thomas.

　　But he sounds a note of caution. "We haven't been happy with that feature - it struggles with covers on 200gsm from colour machines, and quite often the inline trimming is not a great result."

　　As to the colour machines, Print City largely takes an offline approach. The majority of jobs coming from its Xerox 8000 and 2060 are either bound or saddle-stitched. "We get the occasional job that requires stapling, but we take care of that by hand. Again, the option from Xerox was way too expensive for the frequency it would need. We don't run any online finishing on the colour machines. The options were too expensive for what we needed. We have a Plockmatic [hand saddlestitcher] that handles the bulk of finishing work from the colour machines."

　　Thomas says there is a lot more latitude with adjustments such as staple positions when using an offline flow. "It allows for covers to be pre-scored to reduce toner cracking along the spine. It also makes it much easier to work with a range of stocks, for example, a 300gsm cover, then 120gsm for internals."

　　He adds: "Also, we receive many files that have not been set up properly for printing booklets with bleed, so finishing offline gives us more play when it comes to final trim to make sure no type or images are lost."

　　Need for near-line

　　And then there's near-line. Is it the best of both worlds? Sagamore Industries in Melbourne digitally prints and finishes corporate diaries, while its associate company, Product Dynamics, annually produces more than 500,000 Australian school diaries for some 1,400 schools.

　　Formerly a plastics fabricator and offset printer, 52-year-old Sagamore Industries in bayside Seaford is part of a business outfit established by Canadian manufacturing legend Dan Siemens. The local company has a staff of 60.

　　When Sagamore acquired the school diaries supplier, offset printed covers were the norm. But offset required minimum orders of 500, outsourced to a laminator, then guillotined to size, which created sharp, child-unfriendly corners.

　　With digital print maturing, most types of work now lend themselves to lamin­ation, says managing director Philip Allen, who saw the process at Sagamore's sister company, Trimseal Plastics in Vancouver. He adopted the workflow, so that digitally printed diary covers, which can be generated in orders as low as 10 or so, became the Australian company's main revenue source. Product Dynamics now farms out the printing of the diary pages, and focuses on the covers. A3-plus CMYK covers are printed digitally onsite, 2-up or 4-up on a 250gsm stock, using a 55ppm Konica Minolta C5501 and a premium-quality 110ppm Canon ImagePress C1.

　　FotoCovers, its high-end product, are customised for each school, with photography and art - or a mock-up to be completed by Sagamore's design department - supplied by the schools, often as a student project.

　　The diaries are important promotional and communications tools, says Allen.

　　The digitally printed sheets are turned into durable covers - thermally laminated, top and bottom, on a custom-built Hilton laminator, using 250-micron film, then sheeted on a Hilton sheeter, followed by rounded-corner diecutting, before transfer to an in-house bindery for punching and Plastikoil binding. Some binding is outsourced to Marvel.

　　Allen describes the lamination, sheet cutting and diecutting process as a near-line workflow. "We don't work inline because at 55 sheets a minute, the Konica Minolta is too fast for the lamination and diecutting process. It's the physics - thermal laminating has to be done slowly."

　　He says near-line is a neat compromise because it frees Sagamore's print capacity for other work - corporate diaries and stationery, much of it printed in automated 'lights-out' mode.

　　Melbourne company BPA Digital finishes its digitally printed short-run colour and mono textbooks and manuals via a dedicated bindery line, comprising a CEM DocuConverter sheeting unit, Horizon binder and Horizon three-knife trimmer. Binding and trimming are offline. In a workflow processing relatively small sheet stacks, manual transfer of sheets to the binder and trimmer does not present challenges, says BPA Digital managing director Brett Turnley. "We can typically do the binding process quicker than the printing process, so our binding and trimming keeps up with the two Océ machines."

　　The DocuConverter is configured near-line to BPA's two double-sided, A3-plus Océ VarioPrints - a 250ppm 6250 and a 160ppm 6160. The Italian-manufactured sheeter cuts jobs printed four-pages-to-view on the sheet into single book blocks and counter stacks them, ready for the binder. In the past, the 4-up sheets had to be taken to a guillotine, cut and manually stacked, then transferred to the binder. "But while the DocuConverter is physically inline with the Océ machines, it is not fully automated."

　　In fact, there is no functionally inline technology in BPA's bindery. Apart from not needing full automation to keep up with either of the Océs, Turnley is concerned about "weakest link" syndrome - if an integrated binding or trimming function were to stall, it would choke the whole sequence. Moreover,a  true inline configuration limits binding options, he says. "We may not want to cut down the single leaves to perfect-bind a book but keep it as a full-page section and create a same case book. And if you reduce the throughput to allow for these options, you're not getting enough volume through to recover your investment in the kit."

 

[时间：2010-09-17  作者：Peter Kohn   来源：必胜网]