High-tech. High-speed. High-end.

CTP

The plate exposure in our company is done in entirely digital form – i.e. your digital printing data are exposed directly onto the plate (CtP = Computer to Plate). For a tabloid product of 48 pages, 96 plates (48 pages; 2 pages of 4 colours fit on one plate) are required for the printing. To avoid any confusion here, we sort our plates fully automatically. These are identified by means of 2D barcode and applied in the printing unit with the help of a robot..

Robot “Rosi” + roll changer

The device which autonomously takes the extremely heavy rolls of paper to the changer is officially called “Transport Vehicle System”. However, the employees call it “Rosi”. The robot moves up to 22 rolls an hour in the roll storage department.

There are a total of four roll changers that refill the four printing towers. During operation – the paper web is moving at a speed of 13 m/sec – the new web is stuck to the old one and the old paper web is cut off. The machine therefore never has to stand still.

Automatic plate changer

The fully automated plate changer is called APL (Automatic Plate Loader). It can replace the printing plates in the space of four minutes. This is necessary because the Kleine Zeitung has different pages, depending on the region. In the past, the (manual) replacement took up to 20 minutes; the line is stopped during replacement.

The front and back side of the paper web are printed in the printing unit with two colours at the same time. The maximum width of a web in the machine is 180 centimetres.

Each of the two printing machines has two printing towers that for their part each consist of two printing units, for the front and back side. In printing jargon, this is called perfecting mode.

Control system with cameras

This camera systems is one of the most innovative components of the new machine. It checks the precision of the printing and the colour fastness.

The newspaper book is created in the folding system.

Here, the paper web is cut, folded correctly and then laid over itself precisely. This is also done at a speed of around 50 kilometres per hour.

The machine is controlled from the control station.

This is the workplace of the printers who can not only monitor the newspaper production via screens but also see directly onto the machine. Two printers work on each machine. They monitor all processes and have to ensure the required printing quality.

The newspaper leaves the machine at the loading station

The so-called loading station is the point where the newspapers leave the machine (the “rotation”). The path to the dispatch point is now done in the form of transport chains. The producer of this mail room system is the Swiss company Ferag.

The transport chains wind their way for hundreds of metres through the entire mailroom. Thousands of clips hold the individual newspapers together and take them to the mailroom systems where supplements are inserted, special forms of advertising stuck to them, addresses are printed on them and the finished newspaper is made ready for transport to the reader.

The newspapers are filled with supplements and packaged in bundles by the interim storage system.

The newspapers are rolled up on these discs and temporarily stored. In a next step, employees process the supplements that are then inserted. In a last step, the newspapers are bundled into easy-to-handle packages and labelled.