Newspaper press automation and workflow systems, UV curing and an innovative printhead for inkjet printing are among this year’s Printing Industries of America InterTech award winners.

The technology awards follow nominations by manufacturers and are judged by an independent panel of judges, and will be presented at a gala dinner in Chicago, Illinois, on September 11.

Newspaper and commercial web-relevant technologies include:

manroland’s robotic autoprint APL plate changing system – claimed to reduce change times on newspaper presses by up to 90 per cent – is seen as an important feature when circulations are getting smaller and changeovers more frequent. It uses a four-axis robotic arm (pictured) to change plates on two cylinders with a positioning precision of 0.01 mm. With one button makeready, the system can simultaneously change plates in all or selected units within three minutes with no manual intervention necessary. A barcode reader can also verify that plates are in the correct position.

The Australian-developed
Memjet printhead, controller chips and software are curently only used by OEM partners in office, label, photo and wideformat markets but are set to open new markets for digital printing. These are the first implementations of an inkjet head printing process colour in a single pass (700 million drops per second).

The modular open Enfocus Switch automation platform provides a base to automate repetitive tasks associated with receiving, processing, and sorting files. Switch collects incoming files, sorts the files into different folders, and routes them through predetermined processing steps.

Switch integrates with and automates functionality from third-party applications via a visual flow editor with which users can create workflows or import predesigned ones.

Other named technologies were:

• EskoArtwork’s
Studio Toolkit for shrink sleeves;

• KBA’s Flying JobChange system for sheetfed offset presses;

• Komori’s single-lamp H-UV curing system;

• NewPage Corporation’s TrueJet range of coated papers for web-fed inkjet printing in combination with other processes including web-offset;

• The ISO 16612-2 (PDF/VT)
standard for variable data exchange, which allows VDP content files to be portable, easily proofed, colour-managed, and preflighted. Based on the PDF 1.6 imaging model, it supports transparency, ICC-based colour management and layers, and will result in reduced file sizes.