HP structures its inline finishing offer. The American manufacturer has signed an agreement with Germany's manroland Goss to distribute two digital finishing lines, FormerLine and FoldLine, adapted to its PageWide Web Press inkjet presses.
FormerLine handles the production of book blocks from printed reels. This shaping system is designed for short-to-medium runs and on-demand production. Production speeds of up to 7âeuros000Â book blocks per hour are possible for 160-page books, with runs of up to 10âeuros000Â copies.
FoldLine is designed for newspaper production, commercial printing and direct marketing. It accepts various formats, from traditional newspapers to quilted products and book blocks. Belt speed reaches 305 meters per minute.
This agreement extends a long-standing collaboration between the two manufacturers. It covers inline configurations for book and newspaper printers, with fully automated production workflows.
Both lines are based on the Pecom-X automation platform developed by manroland Goss. The system is designed to reduce the need for operator intervention, and to ensure uninterrupted workflows.
This type of configuration is already used in production. German printer GGP Media, an 800-employee subsidiary of Bertelsmann Marketing Services, operates three HP PageWide T490HD monochrome presses combined with FormerLine lines. The installation produces over 400âeuros000 books per week, spread over almost 190 titles, i.e. around 11 million covers and almost 135 million pages. The system operates without manual intervention between jobs, with a waste rate of around 4%.
Barbara McManus, vice president and general manager of HP PageWide, assures: "HP PageWide presses are favored by leading book printers like GGP, because they offer unrivalled productivity, versatility and quality. By working with partners like manroland Goss, we are able to offer a complete solution that enables printers to transfer a growing proportion of their inefficient and costly analog production to a digital environment, and thus grow their business."
