Web Offset -- Turning Up the Heat

Jerry Clark, MAN Roland: The implementation of electronic controls—open architecture design—is increasing reliability of the product that's being produced from a consistency standpoint. With things like automatic platechanging, obviously, the trend is to lower your makereadies, because run lengths are going down. The web offset people are taking on that challenge very well in terms of getting better reliability, stroke repeatability, better operating performance (in terms of up time) and much better makereadies. That's a major positive, because the pressure here is the printer cannot arbitrarily raise his prices every year, even with inflation. It puts more pressure on the manufacturing end of the business to not let his cost get out of hand.