As web widths and newspaper circulations shrink, so too is the performance gap between double-wide and single-wide presses.

With the double-wide market in North America hitting a momentary plateau, vendors are boosting their marketing and R&D in single-wide presses.

Tensor Inc. and Global Web Systems, for example, each rolled out a new single-wide press in time for this year’s Nexpo, while Web Press Corp. added new automation features to its line of Quad-Stacks. And international single-wide vendors such as Manugraph, The Printers House and Solna Web are each trying to carve a niche in the North American market, giving newspapers and commercial printers an even wider array of suppliers from which to choose.

Left to right, Press Journal Printing Co. General Manager Jeff Guay with Pressroom Manager Sean Schilling. The company purchased Quad-Stack presses from Web Press Corp. to bolster color production.
Photo: PJP

Goss International Corp. and Dauphin Graphic Machines Inc., meantime, report strong sales, and MAN Roland Inc. and Koenig & Bauer AG are also seeing interest bubble.

That number of vendors is giving customers a lot of choice, but the intense competition is also forcing suppliers to stay on their toes as they wrestle with containing costs.

More efficient

“My experience is that (single-wides) give us a lot of advantages and help us reduce waste considerably,” said Jeff Guay, general manager of Louisiana, Mo.-based newspaper and commercial printer Press Journal Printing Co. “In the commercial world, the first-off has to be perfect. In the newspaper world, you have a bit more waste. We conduct very detailed maintenance to ensure we have our equipment running at optimum capability.”  

PJP has a 6-unit Community pressline from Goss International Corp., bolstered by two Quad-Stacks from Web Press.

The WPC units were added to help PJP meet increasing color demands and to help the printer keep a tight rein on waste, Guay said.

“We were printing multiple sections and multiple press runs to accommodate the color” before the Quad-Stacks went on-edition. “We liked the Quad-Stacks’ ability to hold color, even with roll changes and web tension changing all the time,” Guay said, adding that the towers helped PJP win a quality award at America East the year after the units were installed.

Looking forward, Guay said PJP envisions adding a third Quad-Stack as well as installing some of WPC’s automation tools to manage ink setting and registration.

Tensor President Don Gustafson said the press format’s versatility and adaptability will always be a strong suit. Even customers that formerly would have considered buying a double-wide press are instead purchasing a single-wide machine to meet demands.

Case in point: Belgian publisher BEA Printing Bvba, which recently commissioned a T-1400 Tensor press engineered with a 27.5-inch cutoff. The press is used to print a number of papers, including the International Herald Tribune, Financial Times and Il Gionale.

Fortified press

To accommodate BEA’s needs, Tensor fortified the press with more rigid frames and thicker journals and bearings for both plate and blanket cylinders, Gustafson said.

While the press was customized for BEA, Gustafson said the machine’s longer cutoff is particularly appealing to Italian and Spanish publishers. They’re also attracted to the press’ lower cost and ease of use. “Flexibility is the key,” he said. “They can print multiple products, or even pick up the press and move it” to another facility if needed.

A second Tensor press, this one to Bahrainian printer Al Ayam Publishing, will blend both heatset and coldset printing in one. The 8-tower T-400BE press will enable Al Ayam to process up to 14 webs, with two towers dedicated to heatset printing, reflecting the machine’s versatility, Gustafson said.

Meantime, Tensor rolled out a new model, the T-500, which offers a 50,000-copy-per-hour rating and three ink form rollers to ensure proper ink coverage. The first customer to buy the model, Engle Printing and Publishing Co. in Lancaster, Pa., will commission the machine later this summer.

The T-500 was engineered to meet the needs of users that demand crisp 4-color reproduction, especially as they begin to employ UV drying and other techniques to approximate heatset printing. In addition to the three ink form rollers, the press sports three vibrator rollers and plate cylinder cocking with form roller-following, Gustafson said.

Global Web Sales also factored in versatility with its recently introduced G 145 TB press, which features a bearer-to-bearer design and a third form roller assembly, said Randy Coakley, president of GWS distributor All Press Parts and Equipment. “What we’re seeing is that people want to run more webs, they want to run more color and they want to run at higher speeds,” he said, adding that the first printer to buy the press is equipping it with UV dryers in order to woo a wider base of customers.

“They’ll be able to print at a quality that’s close to heatset, but at a better price,” he said.

At Seacoast Media Group in Portsmouth, N.H., Operations Director Paul Briand said the publisher chose a single-wide, two-around Magnum press from Goss to anchor a new production facility because of the machine’s “color capabilities and flexibility.”

“When we were searching for a press, we were getting a lot of proposals for (bigger) 70,000-copy-per-hour presses, which is a lot of horsepower for a medium-sized organization like ours,” Briand said.

Seacoast, which publishes a number of daily and weekly publications in New Hampshire and neighboring Maine as well as a heavy load of commercial work, couldn’t see the economics of a double-wide press. “The idea of a 70,000-copy-per-hour press to produce a 2,000-copy commercial run wouldn’t work,” he said.

Briand said Seacoast was also attracted to the Magnum’s two-around format, which will enable the publisher to run collect and thus increase its paging and sectioning capabilities.

The machine will be configured as three four-high towers, two two-high towers and a 2:3:3 jaw folder with two formers. It will permit Seacoast to print up to 48 broadsheet pages with 24 full-color pages and 16 spot color pages in collect mode when it goes on-edition next winter.

Seacoast also plans to exploit the press’ automated features, which will range from Goss’ color preset software to QuadTech’s register guidance system.

Sophistication key

More recently, Derksen Printers Ltd., a Canadian newspaper publisher that prints The Carillon in Steinbach, Manitoba, ordered two Community four-high towers to satisfy demands for more color and versatile products. “The addition will enable us to produce short-run half-tab magazines up to 100,000 copies,” said Rick Derksen, president.

Goss said 2005 single-width press sales helped fuel a “strong year” for the vendor, according to Jochen Meissner, chief operating officer. “We exceeded our sales plan for both Community presses shipped from our joint venture in Shanghai and for our Universal family manufactured in France,” he said, adding that Goss enjoys a greater than 50 percent share of the world market.

DGM, meantime, is also seeing steady interest among customers. “Single-wides are more sophisticated, they have more automation and they give users the ability to produce a wide variety of products,” said Dave Moreland, vice president of sales. “A lot of publishers need to create new products to penetrate new demographics, and that involves products with a large variety of formats that are best suited to a single-wide, one-around press.”

The vendor, which is marking its first anniversary as an independent company, last year sold presses to a number of newspaper publishers, including Ogden Newspapers’ Maui (Hawaii) News and The Opelika-Auburn (Ala.) News. It also sold its first press to Canadian contract printer Transcontinental Inc., which is using a Model 440 press to produce regional editions of The New York Times.

This month, it will deliver another 12 units of its 440 press to suburban Atlanta-based Walton Press, which will use it to produce its roster of daily and weekly newspapers and commercial products. The firm produces more than 200 million impressions each year.

“We have 18 (DGM units) on the floor right now and more on the way,” said Walton President Paul Hynson. “We like what they do, and they provide good service and good parts,” he said, explaining why he purchased another DGM machine.

“We need flexibility and versatility,” Hynson said. “We’ve been able to grow our business more than 80 percent over the past two years and a lot of that is due (to the printing technology) we have on the floor.”

At MAN Roland Inc., web operations Chief Operating Officer Vince Lapinski said the market’s increasing segmentation will propel the growth in single-width press sales.

“There are opportunities to convert older presses to newer single-width, as well as a few sites that could convert from double-width to single-width,” he said, adding that MAN Roland’s Uniset can approximate the 70,000-plus copy-per-hour capacity of the firm’s double-width machines.

News Tribune Co. in Jefferson City, Mo., commissioned its Uniset in late February, capping off an 18-month project that included a new press hall to house the machine.

Mike Vivion, News Tribune’s general manager, said the press, used to print the Daily Capital News, Jefferson City Post-Tribune, the Sunday News Tribune and some area periodicals, is letting the publisher meet escalating color demands. “We were turning down color ads because our old press had limited color capacity,” he said. “Now, we’ve had really good luck upselling color. We can run it on every page.”

Vivion said the press will also allow the company to pursue additional commercial work because of the machine’s versatility and output. “I’m quoting a bid right now for a state job of 540,000 copies. That’s something we couldn’t have done before. We’re very pleased with the press and MAN Roland.”

Providing color capacity was also the primary reason behind The Bismarck (N.D.) Tribune’s purchase of a 3-by-2 Uniset, the first such-configured press to be installed in North America. The format allows The Tribune to produce 12 pages instead of eight per unit, thus boosting page output by 50 percent. The Tribune commissioned the press last year.

Early decision

Lapinski said MAN Roland early on made the decision to engineer its single-wide machines with the same automation features found in the vendor’s double-wide presses.

“This resulted in operational advantages such as faster make-readies, better register control, preset color and the ease of variable web width change-over times,” he said.

The presses can also be equipped with MAN Roland’s Pecom control software, extending the machine’s management to upstream prepress operations.

Gary Owen, KBA’s director of marketing and newspaper sales, said the industry shouldn’t even differentiate between the capabilities of single-wide and double-wide presses. “We look at them as being narrow web or wider web,” he said, adding that the difference between the two models is now less than 8 inches as papers continue to trim their web widths and cutoffs.

““It’s time that the terminology (between single- and double-width machines) goes out the window,” he said. “Instead, look at it as 40-inch presses being narrow web, with anything above that being a wide web.”

KBA, Owen said, continues to see strong interest in narrow web presses, particularly as publishers attempt to diversify their production to produce products that go beyond their core newspapers (see sidebar, above). “Flexibility is the key; and it keeps coming up to the forefront of what users want again and again: How do I fill the other hours in the day when I’m not producing the newspaper: (Narrow web machines) provide them with a great opportunity to print commercial work.”