Oosterhout, August 2015 - Q.I. Press Controls has received the largest ever order in its history from Newsprinters UK for its printing sites in Broxbourne and Eurocentral. Newsprinters comprises three divisions: Broxbourne, Knowsley and Eurocentral. Of these, Broxbourne is the largest and is responsible for printing some of the UK’s major national dailies, such as The Times and The Daily Telegraph. Broxbourne’s plant consists of 60 towers and Eurocentral’s 12. Newsprinters recently announced all these towers are equipped with Q.I. Press Controls’ IDS-3D.

The collaboration with Newsprinters dates back to 2010, when a test system was installed on 5 towers at Broxbourne. Trials continued at the Eurocentral site near Glasgow, which enabled Newsprinters to prove the benefits of the system.

In October 2014, Newsprinters has given Q.I. Press Controls the go-ahead to fit Broxbourne and Eurocentral with the system. Management is satisfied with the partnership with Q.I. Press Controls and believes that use of the innovative IDS-3D, in combination with fountain-water control and Automatic Ink Mist Shields (AIMS), provides optimum repeatable quality and labour savings, resulting in much more efficient presses. Steve Whitehead, managing director of Newsprinters UK, has faith in the system of Q.I. Press Controls: “Following a detailed evaluation over a period of three years we have determined that the system of Q.I. Press Controls is able to reliably fulfil our criteria for an automatic density control system. That is accurate colour control, automatically optimising dampening control, printing fault detection with a management information system to record quality. These systems provide a significant condition monitoring capability at a capital and operating cost that can provide a reasonable return on investment.”

The total surface area of the plant is 16 hectares (40 acres) which equates to around 23 Wembley football pitches. The workfloor in the Broxbourne printing plant occupies around 87,000 square metres. This accommodates 12 triple-wide manroland Colorman XXL press lines with 60 full-colour towers. The printing presses have the capacity to produce one million 120-page issues of a newspaper per hour.

Not only will acquisition of the IDS-3D result in a reduction in production and maintenance costs, but also mark the continuation of a stable working relationship between Q.I. Press Controls and Newsprinters, which has the ambition to become the best newspaper printing plant in the world. Steve Whitehead: “Q.I. Press Controls have remained a responsive and diligent partner throughout the long evaluation process.” Newsprinters is investing in its future by buying in the best quality. By teaming up with Q.I. Press Controls, Newsprinters is putting itself in a position to deliver the best possible service by supplying top quality products to its clients well into the future.

Menno Jansen, chairman of Q.I. Press Controls is enthusiastic about this new milestone: “We’re extremely happy to have received this prestigious order for the installation of 134 IDS-3D cameras for Newprinters in its plants at Eurocentral and Broxbourne. After the successful installation at News Ltd. in Brisbane and Sydney in Australia, this order represents another important landmark in the history of Q.I. Press Controls. The innovative strength of our organisation has brought about two new solutions, such as AIMS, which is installed in front of the camera so that there is no longer any need for lens cleaning. We will continue to harness this innovative strength in our collaboration with Newsprinters in order to develop new ideas which will help bring about further automation and improvement of the printing process.”

Newsprinters will continue its partnership with Q.I. Press Controls in the future and wonders about the collaboration between Q.I. Press Controls and EAE. Newsprinters technical director, Mark Ellington said: “We will continue our partnership with QI in the future to improve the IDS-3D system, in particular, to develop the management information system into a valuable condition monitoring tool. We will also be watching with interest how Q.I. Press Controls and EAE collaborate to develop their press control systems.”