ROLLING MEADOWS, Ill. -- Screen (USA) today announced that King Printing Co., Inc. in Lowell, Mass., has acquired a Screen Truepress Jet520 full-color variable printing system to augment its printing production portfolio.

Adi Chinai, joint managing director of King Printing, considers his company as much an innovator as a printer. The 100-employee book manufacturer continually invests in technology to enhance production capacity and explores different printing techniques and materials to create colorful, eye-catching products. King Printing is the first national book manufacturer to utilize Screen's Truepress Jet520 to print finished book blocks in an automated production line.

"Our overall corporate culture is built around delivering higher quality products faster than our competition," Chinai said. "Our turnaround times are much shorter than the industry standard. Through our technology purchase decisions, we are able to offer ever-shorter time to market for our customers while maintaining high quality standards they have come to expect."

The Truepress Jet520 combines the latest ink jet technology with Dainippon Screen's high-quality color management technology. It provides reliable, high-speed printing while maintaining superior quality.

The Truepress Jet520 from Screen (USA) is a first for the family-owned firm.

"This is our first inkjet press," Chinai said. "We chose the Truepress Jet520 because it provides high-quality, four-color products that complement the component materials we print on our web, sheetfed and digital presses."

King Printing has been a fixture on the short-run and medium-run book manufacturing scene since its founding in 1978. The full-service company caters to the educational and trade publishing markets. It supplies nationally recognized publishers and university presses with book quantities as small as 50 copies and as many as 50,000 copies.

King Printing's manufacturing plant operates three shifts a day, five days a week, producing hard cover, soft cover and mechanically bound titles. Cycle times for completed projects on the Truepress Jet520 are fewer than 10 days, compared to the 15 to 20 days typically seen in the industry today, according to Chinai.

An early advocate of digital production, the company adopted digital print technology in 1989 and computer-to-plate in 1995.

"We made the transition to CTP at a time when only the largest printing companies had the resources to do so," Chinai said.

Always looking for new markets to serve, King Printing had kept a watchful eye on inkjet technology.

"We could see the progress that was taking place in inkjet technology," Chinai said. "The earlier technology was unable to deliver the speed and quality that would support our customers' needs. When we saw the Truepress Jet520 at IPEX 2006, it caught our eye. We spent time investigating the machine and determining the benefits it was capable of offering King Printing."

The Truepress Jet520 prints on standard offset stock, inkjet paper and newsprint up to 20.5 inches wide. It achieves a top printing speed of 210 feet per minute, the equivalent of 55,000 impressions per hour.

King Printing configured the press with two printing units in tandem. The dual-engine duplex arrangement enables half-web or full-web printing on both sides of the roll.

For postproduction, the Truepress Jet520 is outfitted with a state-of-the-art Standard Hunkeler Gen6 paper-handling system for high-performance unwinding, consistent web tension, perfing, web merging, rotary double-cutting and precision stacking. The double-cut capability allows full-bleed trimming across and inline with the web. Perfectly stacked book blocks with edge-to-edge color exit the system ready for downstream processing. This advanced paper-handling configuration provides King Printing with maximum flexibility to produce the full range of applications that can be run on the Truepress Jet520.

"It is a versatile machine," Chinai said. "The powerful front-end system allows for the RIPing of large amounts of variable data. The Truepress Jet520 handles many kinds of substrates so we are not limited in the products we can print. It is well suited to educational and trade books, manuals and workbooks. The image resolution of 720 dpi x 720 dpi is the highest resolution currently available in an inkjet printer. That is important to us because we print a lot images with heavy solids and multiple tones. The high resolution coupled with the print speed give us a very flexible platform for our customers. The press will be a great benefit in managing the inventory cycle for beginning-of-life and end-of-life titles."