On-press consumables for offset presses have changed almost out of all recognition in the past 10 years. The general formulas of fount solution, inks and washes, together with the materials used to make blankets and roller coverings, have undergone dramatic changes to cope with developments in both press technology and the new, more exacting demands of customers for print quality and super-fast delivery.
But alongside those improvements in consumables technology, manufacturers have introduced corresponding price rises with some dropping their 'standard' or 'economy' ranges altogether. And simultaneously, press manufacturers are beginning to insist - and even write into their warranties - that printers must use consumables of a certain performance standard, otherwise it invalidates the press's warranty. The net result is that printers are now paying more - significantly more - for their consumables than a decade ago.
The primary factor in the improvement of consumable technology is press running speed, according to David Sheard, managing director of chemistry manufacturer Hydro-Dynamic Products (HDP). "The shear factor is greater - if you've got a press cylinder on a heatset web whizzing round at 60,000 revolutions an hour, it calls for some pretty sophisticated ink, whose molecules will transfer from plate to blanket, and from blanket to paper, without smashing to pieces. Ink has to stay stable under a more challenging range of conditions now than ever before, and the fount solution has to stay stable along with it, plus all the variables in that chain, like the blanket and the rollers, have to play their part."
A secondary driver is the reduction of alcohol. "It's really on its way out now," Sheard says. "It's expensive to buy, it's a nuisance to dispose of, and it affects the local and the global environment. Reducing it, or even getting rid of it altogether is a no-brainer for most printers." Manufacturers of inks and fount solutions have responded to the quest by introducing liquids that will run with little or no isopropanol (IPA) element.
One significant change in ink formulations over the past few years is the inclusion of oxygen donor elements that activate when the ink comes into contact with water - which effectively means that the ink only dries on the paper and not in the duct. Changes in fount solution formulations have matched this - they are now usually buffered, meaning they have matched their pH balance to the typical pH of the ink, therefore giving the drying process a helping hand.
Cleaner materials
Washes have also changed: increasingly restrictive health and safety and environmental legislation, together with new automatic on-press wash devices, has led to new formulations that are less corrosive, contain less petrochemical solvent and have higher flashpoints.
Rollers and blankets, too, are now made from higher-tech compounds, to enable them to last longer and resist aggressive elements in inks. And the improvement in consumables technology has even reached the humble underblanket, with a new generation underblanket released this year by Italian manufacturer Printgraph Waterless fast replacing cheap-but-fiddly manilla underpacking.
The cost of these improvements is variously estimated at anything from 20% to 80% more, on average, than printers would have paid for the same consumables a decade ago. And this, for some printers, is a problem. "So many firms are running lean programmes now, and finance directors call more of the shots than production directors," says Steve Haig, sales manager at Day International. "Even though consumables are only worth maybe 3% of the total overhead burden, they're still a target for cost reductions. And that doesn't allow the premium products to be demonstrated and trialled so they can justify their extra unit cost."
Despite the reluctance of finance directors, consumables products are now hardly recognisable from their previous incarnations - and so are the benefits they yield. "When you look at our main ranges, they've developed out of all recognition from 12 years back," says Chris Whalley, consumables director of MAN Roland GB. "The benefit to printers from spending more on their consumables is immense. The presses run faster, for longer periods, produce saleable sheets in shorter times, and there are less downtime incidents."
Cheaper isn't better
Whalley also emphasises that buying non-premium consumables is a false economy: "You just use four or five times the amount to get the same result, particularly for things like washes, but you can bet they're not four or five times cheaper," he says. "So actually it ends up costing more."
But the consumables situation is both carrot and stick for printers. While Whalley is keen to emphasise the benefits to printers in using premium-quality consumables, there are also penalties for not doing so. KBA, MAN Roland and Heidel-berg all write into their presses' warranty certificates that press chemistry and consumables used on the machine must be certified by the European print technology research body Fogra - otherwise the press's warranty becomes invalid.
Printers grumbled widely about this when it first became common practice some five years ago, but Day International's Haig says that most accept it as simple good sense - a way, in fact, to maximise the original investment by helping it to run at the peak of its abilities. "Presses are more automated and much more finely-tuned than they were. If you use the wrong chemical in there, it can corrode and break down. Printers do understand that, for all that some are a bit cheesed off."
Haig also explodes the myth that consumables manufacturers are offering kickbacks to press manufacturers. "In fact, the certification programme is contracted out to Fogra, which charges ￡7,000 per product for the approvals process, and that's paid by us consumables developers. If the product doesn't make the grade, you have to reformulate, resubmit and pay another ￡7,000. And press warranties don't stipulate a particular brand of consumables - they just say it must be Fogra-certified."
Whalley is similarly unrepentant about tying warranties to specific consumables: "If you buy a Ferrari, you don't put two-star petrol in it," he says. "You can put cheapo ink in your ducts if you like, but what we're saying is, don't come back to us complaining that the press isn't performing as expected."
Freedom of choice
So are printers left without a choice in their purchasing? "Well, you could look at it like that. But there are huge benefits, and it's daft to ignore them," Haig says. "It's not quite a captive market, but definitely one that's tied into protecting the value of its original capital investment. Put bluntly, you're not going to spend a couple of million on a press and balk at paying ￡40 for 10 litres of fount solution that will keep it running without breaks and at top level print quality."
The past decade has seen a growth in popularity of 'matched systems' of on-press chemistry - typically, where the fount solution and the ink work together for optimum brightness, drying time and good transfer properties. Such systems are typically available at a premium, but do they work? HDP's Sheard thinks there's no real benefit to matched systems: "A lot of it is just marketing. Most printers want freedom of choice and universality from their chemistry, so they're not having to run one system on one press and another on the next press. That means more to them in real, practical terms."
But the universality argument isn't necessarily universally believed. Bradley Aldridge, sales and marketing manager at BFS Pressroom Solutions, is a strong advocate for matched systems: "That's our whole ethos - premium systems that cost a bit more but produce the best result. There isn't a one-size-fits-all. It stands to reason that an ink matched to a fount solution matched to a blanket matched to a wash is going to produce better quality than a pick-and-mix solution."
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