IFRA

Ron Claessen, Manager Information & Production Technology for Wegener, explains the company's approach to save printing ink:

We already use GCR but we expect relatively high savings because:

1. Some advertisement material is delivered to us with ink coverages up to 340%. We find that this is getting more and more, customers not keeping to newspaper standards but using ad material that was prepared for other media, simply demanding that we make the best of it. We want a tool at the end of the prepress process, just before the RIPs, that simply corrects everything that is out of order.

2. Reducing all pages from 240% to probably 180%. We do not have such a tool in operation yet. At the moment we are testing with pages corrected by the vendors on our request. We hope soon to do a test during one week of real production to measure the actual savings, comparing real ink usage per colour with the calculated total coverage, summarised over all productions in that week.

We are convinced that the savings will easily justify the investment, that quality at 180% is fully acceptable und that much quality is gained by eliminating coverages over 240%, thus avoiding smearing and setting off in print production.