Web or sheet-fed

[bluskool]

I have a sort of general question. Our company typically publishes on newsprint. However, we have two monthly pubs that we are taking glossy. Both have a small pressrun of around 6,000 and are roughly 40 to 50 pages a month. We have only had previous glossy work printed on sheet-fed printers. For this new job, we got a few quotes from printers using sheet-fed, but the only person we contacted that operated a web press said that they wouldn't be interested because they didn't want the pressure of sticking to a short turnaround for a small pressrun. So, here (finally) is the question. For a monthly publication, how large of a pressrun would be needed to justify a web press over a sheet-fed? Also, can anyone suggest ideas of where to shop for printers for this sort of job (it seems like the our local printers mainly deal with one-time jobs and not periodicals)? Again, this is all new territory for us so any help or suggestions that can be offered will be much appreciated.

Dan R.

PS: Not sure if this is the proper forum for this thread since its not really prepress or workflow, but I didn't see a forum that was really applicable.

 

[Paultheprinter]

Difficult question, i would guess that 6000 40- 50pp would be sheetfed fodder 3x 16pp a4 sections 18,000 sheets 36,000 run and six M/R. could be done in a little as 4-6 hours on sheetfed. A web running at 45-65 cph would waste more in M/R than on the run, maby this would be suited to a baby web 8pp or 16pp, even then though its a lot of hassle for such a short run. As for the minimum quantity for a web press, it depends on the web press a 3.5M web would only do very large runs and a 8pp web may go down to single thousands. Have you tried a company with an 8 colour sheetfed? As for justification over sheetfed, a web probably (best guess) gains an advantage over runs of 20,000ish

Sorry for the ramble would like to help though

Paul

 

[Joe]

We do monthly and weekly web press runs as low as 3,000 quantity. We used to do a monthy web press run of 550 copies but it went away. No job is too small. We're in Illinois. If you need contact info shoot me a PM.

 

[Thomson Litho]

our web presses has a make ready of around 3 mins and can churn out at 24000 iph, so we only use that over the sheet fed for larger orders, it is much more economical, the only problem is that it is a two-colour as opposed to our sheets which are heidleberg, we have 2,5 or 6 coloured....obvious advantages there, however these take about 250 sheets to get ready so...... so in answer to your question if we knew it was a series of orders, or presumed it would be, say manuals, 2 coloured or mono, that was as long as 3,000 but we thought they would re-order we would run a few extra thousand, may as well while the beast is a awake and this basically would prove more economical, as for a 6,000 40 page again if it onlly required 2 colour or mono that would be our web, its just far more economical... that probably wont help but oh well. my excuse is i am new to the industry (1 month roughly) so i dont exactly know how to explain everything as of yet, oh well, sorry. What kind of web presses do you guys ahve and what spec do they have??

eh just reading through my answer again i am actually not sure which we would run it on, what size and weight is the paper etc?????