KBA Cortina Finds Advocates in its User Base

By: Toni McQuilken

At the end of November 2013, the user group for waterless KBA Cortina newspaper press printers met for the ninth time. The workshop took place inMülheim/Ruhr (Germany) at the headquarters of host company marks-3zet. The company is a sales partner for Toray waterless printing plates, and actively works on improving and developing waterless offset printing technology. Additionally, since 2012 marks-3zet has been a general contractor for pre-press solutions in newspaper houses. There were 15 companies—and thus almost all current Cortina print shops –present in Mülheim.        

Some 60 print experts took part in the meeting as a raft of ink and paper manufacturers sent representatives to Mülheim to participate, sharing experiences from the pressroom as well as to answer the users’ various questions. The agenda included detailed material valuations by the “paper and ink” workgroup and the “error analysis/quality management” workgroup informed the participants of their results.

The KBA Cortina press was also center stage at the World Publishing Expo, held last fall, also in Germany. MittMedia Print AB, based in Sweden, gave a presentation at the show detailing the benefits of the press, and how they are using it to upgrade their business. The company has 115 employees across seven plants, and includes 18 different newspaper titles among its clientele. They installed the Cortina in 2009, after determining that the heatset press was a perfect fit to upgrade an older machine that needed to be replaced. The press went into full production mode in 2011.

“We have in the past two years found out our strengths on the heatset market with a Cortina press—the tabloid format, lead times and low circulations are our key advantages,” said Jan Andersson, CEO, at the conference. “We intend to set a new niche in the heatset market, we call it ‘the new tabloid;’ tabloid products printed in heatset with longer lifetimes. The heatset print quality in a Cortina press cannot be achieved in a conventional coldset press producing heatset in our opinion. We have full flexibility between coldset and heatset, and we can, due to this flexibility, handle the ongoing decline of circulation of newspapers smoothly.”