Saturday, August 04, 2018

Mediaprint hosts open house to showcase retrofit

Mediaprint Vienna, one of Europe's biggest newspaper printers, has been undergoing a major retrofit project.
New QIPC quality control systems have been installed for the Austrian printer, the joint print service provider for the publishers of Kronen-Zeitung and Kurier (combined print run of just under 950,000 copies). Koenig & Bauer has undertaken an extensive mechanical retrofit and EAE has completely overhauled the control electronics and software architecture for the company.
More than 30 newspaper printers from eight countries were invited to Vienna for an early May open house to see the largest retrofit project that EAE has undertaken to date, said a release from QIPC – EAE.
All 39 press towers have been fitted with Q.I. Press Controls' current IDS-3D closed loop density control. The existing ABB controls and the ABB planning system are being replaced with EAE control components andVIP Dispo/Mail/Statistic and Print Image software packages. In addition, the printing plant is the first user of the new EAE Desk 7 control desk. Three of the eight presses at the Vienna-Inzersdorf site have now been fully upgraded.
A control desk upgrade is also happening in a project underway in Amsterdam. De Persgroep, the Dutch customer, will not only cut the number of control desks per press from three to two, as at Mediaprint, but it also aims to control two press lines from a single Desk 7.
The EAE part of the Mediaprint project got underway in February 2017 and the conversion of the 13 web presses should be done by May of next year. Progress has been helped by the fact that one of the eight Mediaprint presses in Vienna could be taken out of production for ten weeks.
Attendees at the open house were treated to an in-depth presentation of how the EAE software modules work through a mix of talks and live production.

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