Heidelberg: We Still Love Newspapers

By: Mark Fitzgerald Heidelberg may have shed its web press division, but that doesn't mean it is abandoning the newspaper industry, the German manufacturer's top U.S. executive told E&P.

"Our focus, to put it in a very simple way, is all on the sheetfed press -- and everything that goes in front of it and everything that goes in back of it," Heidelberg USA President James P. Dunn said Wednesday. "Now apparently, on the surface, that seems to exclude newspapers, but that's not entirely so."

Speaking in the sprawling Heidelberg booth as the annual Graph Expo commercial printing equipment show wound down in Chicago, Dunn said he believed Heidelberg had a lot to offer with the enterprise and production workflow solutions on the Prinect platform. He noted that the company is an active participant in CIP4, the international standards body responsible for the JDF (Job Definition Format) workflow automation standard.

"And, of course, there's our continued investment participation in Goss (International Corp.), which gives us a tangency into the newspaper," Dunn added.

When Goss completed its acquisition of Heidelberg Web Systems from Heidelberg USA parent Heidelberger Druckmaschinen AG in August, the German company received a 15% stake in Goss as part of the deal. Other terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

In a wide-ranging interview, Dunn suggested the digital press -- which has taken the commercial printing industry by storm in the past decade -- will be slower to migrate to newspaper printing, if it ever does. "The issue is looking at digital presses or small offset presses as output devices, and you have to let the job specifications define what output device you use," he said.

Commercial printing's acceptance of digital presses is at the point now that Dunn said shops tell him it is "not a tough decision" to switch from offset to digital. He added, however, that it's still unclear whether digital presses -- which are very efficient for quick make-ready between short-run jobs -- will ever be appropriate "output devices" for newspapers, which typically require longer press runs. He noted that digital press manufacturers no longer place as much emphasis as they once did on increasing the number of impressions before re-imaging was required.

The promise of a digital press that can efficiently print new images with each turn of a cylinder also appears to be farther off than it once appeared, Dunn said: "The digital press, in terms of the heavy, heavy variable printing, have not delivered as much as (the big equipment show) drupa 2000 said it would. But in terms of versioning and short-run, it has come through."

Like other vendor executives at Graph Expo, Dunn said he was impressed with the traffic at the show, which was held just three months after the massive drupa show in Germany.