Original or Facsimile?
Applications: marvellous reproductions from Graz
Print & Art Faksimile Austria in Graz is one of the world's leaders in producing facsimiles of old books and manuscripts. This company uses an InlineFoiler Prindor in a ROLAND 700 from MAN Roland to apply gold foil to the facsimiles. Besides this the company which was founded in 1989 prints financial reports, trade journals and high-grade advertising products.
MAN Roland InlineFoiler Prindor for the most demanding quality
The InlineFoiler Prindor uses the cold foil laminating method to produce noble prints inline in the highest quality. The system is mounted on a ROLAND 700 and the quality of the cold foil laminating is equal to that of hot-foil stamping and the gloss levels achieved are higher than those of the gold application methods previously used. The process requires two printing units of a sheetfed press. In the first printing unit, the areas of the substrate where foil is to be applied are printed with a special adhesive ink by a conventional plate, and the foil is laminated to these areas in the second printing unit.
The second production step of hot-foil stamping the company needed to take previously to get high gloss is no longer necessary, the value-adding process stays in the printing plant, inline production avoids register problems, print enhancement can be done at high press speeds, and no special embossing dies are needed – only printing plates. All this saves costs. Foil can be applied all over the sheet or in parts and one can print on the foil with special inks in very good quality.
Print & Art Faksimile Austria is a global leader
Rare and valuable manuscripts are stored in libraries all over the world and almost all of the most beautiful facsimiles of these works of art are meanwhile produced in Graz. At least company founder and Managing Director Walter Pietsch is convinced about this. Through intensive research in all production areas of manuscript reproduction, he remarks that Print & Art Faksimile Austria has "in the past few years become probably the world's leading producer of facsimiles".
For instance, some years ago his company was the first to produce a facsimile with frequency-modulated (FM) screens, a technology that enables even the finest details of a manuscript to be reproduced true to the original. These days Print & Art Faksimile works with hybrid screen technology that combines FM elements with conventional screens. With Bibles, Gospels or other precious books the reproduction of gold and silver which is portrayed differently in every manuscript is a great challenge. They may be decorated with matt or glossy gold leaf and burnished gold, as well as silver that shows strong signs of ageing. This must all be faithfully reproduced in the facsimile.
"The facsimile should be absolutely identical to the original", says Walter Pietsch. There are however some constraints since he believes that parchment for instance cannot be printed using facsimile methods and gold leaf and silver can never be perfectly reproduced. "Our objective is at least with the colours to achieve results that cannot be bettered." In the coloured areas of the page backgrounds, meaning the areas without text and illustrations, tonal corrections as fine as 1% are made, because as Pietsch says, "The human eye can already detect a 1% deviation in magenta."
An InlineFoiler Prindor for China as well
MAN Roland has also sold an InlineFoiler Prindor outside of Europe. During the recent China Print show the Hucais Group Co. Ltd., an innovative Chinese producer of high-grade cigarette packaging, ordered an eight-colour ROLAND 700 with coating module plus an InlineFoiler Prindor which is to be installed in the company's plant in Dongguan.
Hucais plans to also sell the products from the InlineFoiler Prindor outside China, targeting other Asian countries as well as Europe. Hucais is to produce the foils in its own foil factory.