Upgrading an Existing Offset Press – A Success Story

Benefits of the Alder Press Control bundle

It’s Tuesday, January 2nd, and I’m diving into 2024 with my first blog post of the year. I thought I’d share a success story from an installation we did last month with our Alder Press Control package. Custom Printing in Oxnard, CA has been a long standing customer of ours for many years. As many of you know, Alder Color Solutions is a division of Great Western Ink, who manufactures both offset and flexo inks. Custom Printing has 3 offset presses – 2 40″ Mitsubishi’s and 1 28″ Komori. 1 of the Mitsubishi’s was already outfitted with an X-Rite Intellitrax and closed-loop color control – the other 2 presses they were doing makeready with a very old handheld densitometer. They decided to upgrade 2 of their presses.

The package comes with a manual scanning spectrophotometer (CSS110), a 29″ or 40″ track/scan ruler, and both PrintMeasure and ChromaChecker software – as well as 3 days of onsite installation and operator training. The package does not include a new PC or flatscreen TV but we do provide minimum requirements and recommendations. Before we arrived, we worked with the client to get the computers installed and TV displays mounted in their existing consoles. We modified their existing color bar for use in this new system, output a proof of it and made sure we could measure it properly before including it on any new plates.

Once we got the PrintMeasure software installed, licensed and configured and the ChromaChecker account created and configured, we were able to login to CC directly in PM. With this new system, they can now measure every patch in their 40″ color bar in 10 seconds. It’s not automated, the operator just presses the button on the instrument and slides it slowly across the scan ruler. All color patch values then appear on the screen, showing the press operator exactly what adjustments need to be made for each color and ink zone. It is NOT a “closed-loop” system, which would adjust the ink keys automatically, but it is a huge leap compared to how they’d been doing things for decades.

With the new software they can look at density values, like they’re used to doing, but density values have not been part of any printing specification, worldwide, since before 2006. In North America, we are usually targeting the regional specifications for SWOP or GRACoL. The main thing a press operator should be focusing on is not density – it’s passing conformance to whichever spec they’re targeting. Their old system provided no way of showing them if they were passing or not, nor did it predict exactly what adjustments to make to get into passing conformance.

So, now they can scan the entire color bar in 10 seconds and the software shows them immediately if they’re passing, or what adjustments to make to get the job passing. This has enabled them to get to color in less than half the time, with less than half the ink/paper. Plus, every measurement also goes to the cloud!

This is also incredibly powerful. Now upper management has all the data for every job. They can log into the online dashboard from anywhere and monitor jobs and conformance. They can enable all data to automatically populate different reports, so they can use that data to see how well they’re printing and make adjustments to improve. Plus, they can share this conformance data with the client/print buyer. They can also create and/or revise G7 plate curves from this same cloud platform.

Additionally, the cloud platform enables them to monitor every aspect of their manufacturing process. From the instruments they use, to the lighting they have, their environmental conditions, fountain solution, NIP pressures per cylinder, any papers or substrates they print all – all can be monitored for conformance with the subscription that comes with this package.

Bottom line is the customer is absolutely thrilled with their purchase and are already reaping the benefits of achieving better color with less time and materials and being able to prove that to anyone. Just look at all of these smiling faces!

If you’re interested in learning more about this, feel free to contact us at [email protected] You can also click the link and check out this bundle on our online store here.