The thirst for automation has reached the finishing room for digital printers. Canadian Printer spoke to some of the key manufacturers and suppliers of finishing equipment and solutions to find out what's hot in the market, and what new equipment can make a difference in the digital print shop of tomorrow.

The hottest finishing items tend to be creasers and folders, but apart from specific types of machinery, what really make a difference in the print finishing room are automation and flexibility. Printers from in-plants to neighbourhood copy shops, or large-scale digital printers, are all buying equipment that speeds production and can adjust to rapidly changing demands and conditions.

"When you're spending $300,000 to $500,000 for a highend digital printer, you want the image to be impressive," says Steve Allen, president of Burlington, Ontario-based Graphic Whizard, manufacturer of numbering systems and creasers like the Creasemaster line. "If you haven't protected the image, its impact is nowhere near what it could be."

Since the advent of digital printing, folding a sheet with a lot of toner coverage tended to produce to cracking along the spine, leaving an unsightly white line along the edge of the fold. The solution is to score or crease the sheet before it's folded, keeping the toner from breaking and maintaining a continuous image around a fold. The growth of digital printing has subsequently created a growing demand for creasing systems, a relatively modest investment when compared to a high-speed digital colour press.

"Creasers have been hot for the past three to four years, and sales continue to grow," says Allen. Graphic Whizard is betting that their newest creaser, the CreaseMaster Platinum, will satisfy the most demanding requests for creasing systems.

At press time, the company was also working on another new product, an addition to its UV coater line. The new product, still unnamed, will have a 20-inch capacity, according to Allen.

For David Marsh, president of graphic arts equipment dealer Sydney R. Stone of Toronto, automation is not only getting the greatest attention from the printing market today, it also holds the greatest potential for boosting profit.

Marsh points to one of their newest products, the Nagel Robofeeder F100 ISP for collating and feeding a bookletmaker. Fully automated and computer- controlled, this feeder can accept input from multiple print engines�for example, heavy card covers from an iGen system and text stock from a high-speed copier�and merge as many as 10,000 sets per hour.

Marsh is also enthusiastic about machines that combine functions, such as the Morgana Digifold, which both creases and folds in one operation. "It's much more cost-effective machine than a stand-alone creaser or folder," suggests Marsh. "We've had a lot of installations recently, and it's constantly on backorder with the manufacturer in the U.K."

Products that combine two operations are selling strongly today, confirms Anna Massey, sales and marketing manager and international sales manager of Gateway Bookbinding Systems. The Winnipeg company better known by its main product, Plastikoil plastic coil book bindings, is doing quite well with its new product, which both bends and cuts the company's plastic coil bindings�the TCB, or Total Cut and Bend.

The main benefit, explains Massey, is that it's a single unit that performs both bending and cutting operations, and can cut different sizes of binding (from 6 mm to 50 mm) without requiring the operator to change crimping heads.

The product is appealing to a wide range of printers, from large to small, including ondemand printers, in-plant printers and even trade binderies, says Massey. "It's a flexible, easy to operate machine that operates consistently," she explains. "The ease of use and the range of capabilities make it fit into a wide range of operations. We're selling them as fast as we can build them."

Customers often combine the TCB with another two-operation machine, a countertop or tabletop size roller-inserter such as the PBS 2500. Putting these two machines side-by-side or in-line expands a digital printer's capability and boosts efficiency at the same time, she says.

"Automation is the driver of demand in digital finishing equipment," says Ken Harbin of Prism Graphic Equipment, which sells Standard Horizon finishing equipment. "It's harder and more expensive to find and hold onto skilled, trained people who can operate finishing equipment, so systems that are easy to set up and use, where you can basically push a button, are in great demand right now."

For Harbin, the hot products this year are automated folders and combined, automated systems that produce finished, bound booklets with little operator intervention after set-up.

"Digital printers represent about 70 percent of our market," Harbin says. He predicts that the day is not long off when printers will be able to invest in a single system that produces short-run casebound books directly from output from a digital press. "People want a nice-looking, hard-bound book on demand," he says. And they expect that kind of capability from whatever printing system produces the pages.

Putting it all together
All the suppliers that spoke with Canadian Printer also pointed out that the demand is increasing for faster, smaller, more automated, more flexible systems that combine functions into one machine that will reach across the market. Large printers as well as copy-shops and in-plants have a demand for easy-to-use, light and small equipment. All of this brings the digital printing specialists one step closer to "push-button" publishing.