JPEG Chart: How it WorksTake all the current newspaper printing processes and fill out a report card. What comments do you think flexography would get?
"Good, but not working up to potential."
And that report would get little argument, even from flexo evangelists, because everybody agrees the potential is huge. Flexo promises no ink ruboff, flint-hard halftone dots, brilliant colors, simpler press designs, less waste and fewer environmental headaches.
The flexo bandwagon is finally rolling, but it's not exactly crowded. Why have newspapers given this technology a cold shoulder?
"I don't understand why, I really don't," says Danny Collins, director of operations at The News & Observer in Raleigh, N.C., which in October went 100 percent flexo. "Our printing is fabulous. We're out-printing many offset sites right now, just two months into it."
Nonetheless, there is a real resistance to flexo among newspapers---an irony when you consider that in other graphic-arts applications such as packaging, phone books and even color comics, flexo is huge.
The reasons are complex, involving historical marketing missteps, technical problems, biases and publishers' raw fear of not being in the mainstream, particularly when making multimillion-dollar decisions they'll live with for decades.
Understanding the dilemma requires an understanding of the flexo process itself. From the outside (unless you're on a press crew), you'd be hard put to tell a flexo press from any other. Paper snakes through various rollers, picks up images as it moves from unit to unit, and is slit and folded. So far, no big deal.
But inside's a different story:
Those are the mechanics. How do they translate into technological advantages?
For Danny Collins, that was the clincher that elevated flexo above offset. "We went to Louisville to look at a flexo press, and what blew me away was they'd put on the plates, hit 'go,' and within 20 or 30 copies, they had perfectly salable papers in perfect registration. I got religion. This wasn't true of any other press design."
After a new, eight-unit KBA-Motter Corp. press was installed at Raleigh this autumn, paper waste (already a respectable 3.5 percent to 4.5 percent) shrank to 1.75 percent. "That'll come down, too---we're already seeing numbers like 1.1 percent," Collins says. "I'm not sure where it's going to bottom out, but it'll be approaching 1 percent---and this is running color throughout the paper."
These are heady compliments indeed from the working press, but the question persists---if flexo's so smart, why ain't it rich? Some possible answers, gleaned from around the industry:
1. Flexo's good but not that good. "Flexo offers an alternative to offset, but offset is a good process," says Bob Shadrick, director of operations for The Journal Bulletin of Providence, R.I., and president of the Flexo Newspaper User's Group. "I'm not going to say anything bad about it. We put out a decent, good-looking paper every day of the week, but I have to tell you, The Boston Globe does the same thing, and they're offset."
Many flexo sites report that as good as the color is, the black-and-white halftones need some work. Plastic plates don't hold highlight dots as well as offset, and halftone plugging---the bane of flexo since its early days---has been reduced but not eliminated.
"Everybody still has plugging problems," says John Rodney, vice president of operations at The Press of Atlantic City, N.J. "Newsprint fibers build up in the solid areas." Collins agrees: "Plugging is our only printing issue. We're learning that humidity has a lot to do with it. When the weather went cold and the humidity dropped, plugging went way up."
2. Flexo isn't being pushed by the big press manufacturers. You don't see many flexo presses from Rockwell Graphic Systems or Mitsubishi Lithographic Presses Inc. The smaller companies---KBA-Motter, Man Roland Inc., North American Cerutti---are the flexo companies. The reluctance of the bigger companies robs newspaper flexo of a critical mass that could contribute to faster growth.
Shadrick puts it simply: "Who wants competition? Why would you want flexo when you've got the offset market locked in?"
3. Flexo stumbled early. "Flexo got off to a slow start," says Greg D'Amico, an assistant professor at New York University. "Everybody billed it as a miracle to cut costs, but we ran into a plugging situation where the ink dried too quickly on the plates. We also had chrome anilox rollers that were wearing out too quickly. Now they've switched to ceramic rollers that have an extremely long life.
"There's some bad rap from the early problems. There is a lot of bad press floating around the industry."
4. The plates are too expensive.
Flexo plates cost between $3 and $4, while offset plates are between $1 and $1.50. For a big paper, that's a big difference. Related to the cost issue is the number of vendors---only three. And NAPP Systems Inc., the only provider of precoated plates, has possibly 85 percent of the business.
"As a practical matter," says Rodney, "there's only one plate supplier. I think that until the plate-cost and plate-supply issues are resolved, that's enough to convince somebody to avoid the technology."
Shadrick says that "some people are concerned" with the paucity of flexo plate vendors, but he's not one of them. "We've had two plate manufacturers and one press manufacturer, and we've never missed an edition."
5. It's lonely out there on a limb.
"There's resistance to change," D'Amico says, "and sometimes the bigger the change, the more resistance."
Gary Owen, director of marketing and newspaper sales for KBA-Motter, says the greatest resistance is to the very idea of a flexo plate. "What's holding flexo back from rapid growth is the reluctance of people to consider a relief-type plate."
Others, such as Rodney, see it as a more general uneasiness with nontraditional technology. "There's just plain security in being in the mainstream. To put it bluntly, you're not going to be fired for going offset, when 85 percent of the newspapers in the country are offset."
So where does flexo go from here?
D'Amico says the technology will advance, one unit at a time. This is the "sprinkle" system, where flexo presses add color capability to existing letterpresses. The web goes through the flexo units and picks up color on the section fronts and backs, while the rest of the paper is printed on the older presses. If all goes well, the newspaper will gradually replace its letterpresses---a kind of creeping installation. "It's easy for purchasers because you don't have to throw away iron," says D'Amico.
Another development is single-wide flexo presses for smaller newspapers---a recent entry for which D'Amico has high hopes. The combination of conversions and new-press sales could expand the market enough to lure in more vendors, in turn lowering prices and enabling greater growth.
Meanwhile, the present flexo users seem happy. "The readers like it, the advertisers like it, and it's a clean, crisp newspaper," says Shadrick. "It's a nice little world to live in."
John Bryan is a member of the Technology Resources Group at the Los Angeles Times. E-mail, John.Bryan@latimes.com ; phone, (818) 882-5957.
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