ProImage Software Presets Registration to Reduce Waste and Improve Quality for Asbury Park Press

Princeton, NJ – 1st August 2012: For many newspapers a decline in circulation means that they no longer have the budget to rebuild or replace their old presses.  However as presses get older registration becomes more difficult to achieve – yet advertisers as well as readers demand an ever-higher color quality.  Every advertiser and reader has to be satisfied with the printed product or ad revenue and circulation is likely to decline further – it can become a vicious spiral.

To overcome this dilemma, ProImage designed a new software solution - NewsWay Press Register. It greatly improves the final print registration and minimizes time spent making mechanical adjustment on the press. It does this by processing the 1 bit Tiff of each individual separation (C, M, Y or K) to the appropriate size and angular deviation in order to compensate for any web press mis-alignment on the plate.

NewsWay Press Register comes with a Press Wizard for manually assigning plates to a unit. Also included is a digital microscope to accurately measure the amount of correction needed for significantly improved registration at press start. It can also import a text/XML file from an existing Press Control System to obtain cylinder and plate location, to automate where plates go on the press, and route TIFFs to the correct set-up for processing.

The software can operate as a stand-alone server and can also be easily implemented within the printer’s workflow. 


The Asbury Park Press, New Jersey, USA
Asbury Park Press is a Gannett-owned newspaper company located in Neptune, New Jersey. Its Goss Metro and Metroliner presses are almost 30 years old and the company was seeing a deterioration of the plate cylinder at the lead edge. This deterioration was causing poor registration. To correct this they had to pre-shim the lead edge of their plates. This pre-shimming had to be made on 15 percent of their plate positions. Shims however are not an effective way to register plates due to their standard thickness (ie: .010, .015, .020mm) when registration can be out by any amount.  Shims also have the tendency to fall off during the press run and if they collect in the gap or slide underneath the plate it can cause damage to the blankets.

For Asbury Park the standard process positions were 4/1 lead, one mono unit into one mono/deck unit when they also experienced a small amount of fan-out between the two units.  They also run a 4/4 lead, one mono though two mono/deck units to achieve back-to-back color and experienced a considerable amount of fan out when running this configuration. The ProImage software now enables them to adjust images to correct this problem.

Before installing Press Register, Asbury suffered the delay and cost of an averaged two press stops per run in order to better register color.

Rick Shafranek – VP Sales for ProImage states, “The system is improving registration and is minimizing press stops, additional savings include the elimination of shim purchases and the savings of not having to replace blankets due to shims coming off and damaging them.” Later in the year Press Register will import a file from Harland Simon to automate the planning process.

Information provided on behalf of New ProImage by Media Matters,
Contact; Richard Hall. Tel: +33 (0)4 67 00 25 87, Mob: +44 (0)7831 777 210
e-mail: richard@media-matters.com