Arrosetti - One quick question on the Duplo: I have looked hard at buying one but just keep getting stuck on whether it will work well for digital production. We run a Ricoh 900 and do about 1.2 million clicks per year and am looking for a way to automate cutting. I am hesitant because of registration being off by 1/16" and whether the Duplo can handle that or will the image be in different places on the cards? What is your experience as to the consistency of the cutting and use of it with digital production?
We have a lot of Standard/Horizon, Baum and Challanger finishing, with this being our only Duplo product. We have always been hesitant to purchase Duplo because of their past quality and longevity concerns. But being an all digital shop I have to say we are considering replacing some of our other bindery to Duplo because that is what they do. Everything they offer is designed and created for digital printing making their products work so much better in our environment with a lot less make ready and setup.
To answer your question specifically. Since Duplo understands this will be printed on a digital printer with unperfect registration they have incorporated several different fixes:
1.) Registration Marks You can add a registration mark scanner to your slitter, you print a little mark in the upper right hand corner of all your prints. I think the mark should be designed to print 10mm from the lead edge and the side edge of the sheet. So if when it reads the mark it notices that it is 9mm from the lead edge and 11 from the side it will make the appropriate adjustments on the fly to the slitters and guillotine. It obviously has to slow down to make the adjustment before feeding each sheet so it does not run at rated speed in this mode. This helps with page to page registration which is not an issue at our shop. Our prints don't tend to bounce around throughout a run so we do not use this system anymore.
2.) Shrinkage As we all know sheets can either shrink or in some cases enlarge when going through the fuser. What Duplo allows you to do is apply shrinkage to a job. So if you run a 12x18" sheet the length should 457.2mm (Duplo only works in metric which is fine with me). You would measure the sheet after printing and put in the new length which is usually something like 456.8 or so. The software has an algorithm to make the correction across the length of the page. It deletes these setting after you change to a new program. So if you go from business cards to postcards the shrinkage resets. So if the business cards shrunk .4mm the same 12x18 sheet that ran the postcard might have shrunk .6mm because of coverage 1 or 2 sided or other factors. Tt forces you to remeasure each time you run a new batch which I like.
3.)Fine Tune Adjustments Lastly if allows you to shift the cutting up/down left/right in .1mm increments. So if your printers registration was printing 1mm to0 close to the lead for whatever reason you can move the cutting up 1mm. Again these adjustments are not saved past that current session so tomorrow if your printer decides to print correctly again the cutting will be back to the default setting.
I would highly suggest getting the software to program jobs on a PC rather then on the machine itself. We didn't buy the stand/PC from Duplo, we just used an old windows 98 machine and an old PC stand.
Lastly, for those who think it is only a business card slitter. It allows you to save up to 80 different programs on the machine (unlimited if you use a PC), we have about 50-60 of those slots filled with all sorts of different programs. It is an extremely versitile machine. It can be slow vs. a guillotine but it also requires about 10 minutes of human interaction per hour.
