Italian printer Grafica Veneta has installed two RotaJet 130 digital web presses from Koenig & Bauer as its first major venture into fully digital book printing.
An existing Koenig & Bauer offset customer, Grafica Veneta started its digital printing journey with covers produced first on a Fujifilm JetPress 720S, replaced by a 750S model in 2021 . The RotaJet, which was installed in the company’s Trebaseleghe facility near Venice in the autumn of 2022, has been matched by a similar unit at Lake Book Manufacturing near Chicago, Illinois, US, installed in early 2023. Lake Book was acquired by Grafica Veneta in 2021 and the investment in digital print capacity there is seen as key to expansion in the US market
Both RotaJet installations support 1/1 production on a 1300mm web, with paper handling via Koenig & Bauer’s Pastomat reel stand and Patras M reel logistics system; front-to-back register is effected via two central cylinders and fine-tuned hot air and IR dryers enable printing on light papers. They feed into automated finishing lines that produce finished books in a single workflow. The reel-to-finished book time is said to be under one minute.
‘The press has been in full production since autumn 2022 and will have a lasting impact on the book printing market,’ says company owner Fabio Franceschi. ‘Our long-standing and trustful partnership with Koenig & Bauer is now growing to include digital printing. The RotaJet offers us and our customers a whole host of new opportunities in many areas. Thanks to the digital capabilities of this press, we can also print smaller jobs more efficiently and in top quality, and that will enable us to react quickly to changing market demands.’
The RotaJet presses can handle a range of materials and weights, from tissue paper to board, with applications from leaflet to folding cartons, coffee bags and wall decor, the latter supported by a cut-off length of over 5m. Christoph Müller, CEO Segment Digital & Webfed at Koenig & Bauer, commented, ‘This project demonstrates that our high-performance RotaJet digital press is able to print a wide variety of products on almost all substrates.’
