Prensa nueva, mismo cuello de botella

Between 20 and 31 July 2026, three sheetfed offset investments were announced within days of each other, on two continents. Each came with a productivity number in the headline. Read together they say something useful about where offset is going, and about the part of the job the machine builder cannot fix for you.

What the new offset press announcements actually promise

The three announcements are close enough in format to compare directly.

• Prodigy Graphics, a trade printer in Toronto, is installing two Koenig & Bauer Rapida 106 presses, a four color plus coater and an eight color plus coater and perfector, and expects a 40 percent increase in efficiency and capacity.
• Zenith Print Group in the UK has bought a Heidelberg Speedmaster XL 106-5-P+L, quoted at roughly 35 percent additional production capacity.
• Selsey Press has installed the first Komori G837P Advance EX Edition in the UK, a perfecting press bought as a multi million pound investment.

Three builders, three formats, one shared claim: more sheets per shift. That claim is real. It is also rated at running speed, on a press that is already printing to color.

Where a rated capacity gain actually gets spent

The typical commercial and packaging job has been getting shorter for a decade. When run lengths fall, the share of press time spent running falls with them, and the share spent changing over rises. A press that runs 20 percent faster on a four hour job returns most of that gain. The same press on a forty minute job returns very little of it, because the job is dominated by everything that happens before the first good sheet.

That is the arithmetic behind a lot of disappointing capex. The press meets its specification. The shop does not see the promised capacity, because the constraint moved.

• Plate change and washup: automated on every current 106 format press, already fast, little headroom left
• Ink presetting from CIP3 or CIP4 data: puts the ink zones approximately right before the first sheet
• Color approval: print, measure, adjust the ink keys, print again, measure again, until the sheet is inside tolerance. This loop is manual on most presses, and it is where the remaining minutes sit

Does a new press make makeready faster?

Partly. A new press shortens the mechanical part of makeready: plate changes, blanket washes, format changes and ink presetting are all faster and more automated than on a press from ten years ago. What it does not shorten by itself is the color approval loop, because that loop depends on measuring the sheet and deciding what to change. On most installations, including brand new ones, an operator still reads a measurement, judges it and moves the ink keys by hand. The press got faster. The decision did not.

The part that does not come in the crate

CIP3 and CIP4 presetting is the standard answer here, and it is a genuinely good one. Ink zone openings are calculated from the plate image before the job starts, so the first sheet lands in the neighbourhood of the target rather than nowhere near it. Presetting is the reason makeready waste on a modern press is counted in dozens of sheets rather than hundreds.

It is also open loop. Presetting predicts, it does not verify. Paper, ink batch, temperature, humidity, blanket condition and press speed all move the result away from the prediction, and nothing in the presetting chain measures that drift or corrects it. Closing the gap between the presetting sheet and the approved sheet is still manual work, and it is still repeated at every speed change and every recovery during the run.

What is closed loop color control on an offset press?

It is the step that turns a measurement into an ink key correction automatically. The color bar is scanned, the software compares each zone against the target values, calculates the correction and sends it to the press console. The operator validates rather than calculates. Because the loop works on measured data rather than on judgement, the second sheet is closer than it would otherwise be, the third closer again, and the run holds after approval. How that loop works, the waste and makeready numbers behind it and what a retrofit involves are set out in the complete closed loop guide. The measurement side is served by an ecosystem of scanning and reporting tools, X-Rite IntelliTrax2 and MeasureColor among them, but the correction itself is what closes the loop.

Why this is a worldwide pattern, not a local one

It is worth noting where these three announcements came from: Toronto and two UK shops, inside two weeks. The same conversation is happening in packaging plants in Mexico, in commercial shops in Japan and in carton converters across Europe, because the underlying pressure is identical everywhere. Run lengths are shorter, the tolerances brand owners impose are tighter, and experienced press operators are harder to recruit than they were. Closed loop color control is running on more than 1,000 systems in over 30 countries for exactly that reason: the constraint is not regional. North American printers weighing this alongside a press order will find the local view on the Canada page.

Does a press have to be new to run closed loop?

No. What matters is the console: whether it exposes an interface that accepts ink key corrections, and whether a measurement source is available press side. Many consoles from the previous generation qualify, including Heidelberg CP2000 and Prinect Press Center, Komori PQC-S and KHS-AI, Koenig & Bauer ErgoTronic and Manroland ColorPilot. The quickest way to settle it for a specific machine is the free console eligibility check: a few photographs of the console, an answer within one business day. Terms used above, from makeready to ink zone, are defined in the glossary.

The number to run before the press arrives

If a press order is on the table, the useful exercise is to split the promised gain in two. Ask the builder what share of the quoted 35 or 40 percent comes from running speed, and what share comes from faster changeover. Then take your own job list and work out how many hours per week actually go into color approval, at your average run length, in your ink and substrate mix. That second number is the one a press purchase leaves largely untouched and a closed loop addresses directly. The ROI calculator does the arithmetic on waste sheets, makeready minutes, ink and energy if you would rather not build the spreadsheet yourself.

None of this is an argument against buying the press. A Rapida 106, an XL 106 or a G837P is a better machine than what it replaces, and the capacity is real. The point is narrower: the new press raises the ceiling, and the color approval loop sets the floor. Raising one without raising the other is how a 40 percent investment turns into a 15 percent result.