Rolling Meadows, IL, August 21, 2007—Komori America Corporation, a premier manufacturer of sheetfed and web offset printing presses, today announced that Palmer Printing, St. Cloud, Minnesota, has installed a new five-color 40” Komori LS40 (LS540) offset press with aqueous coater. Palmer Printing’s new LS540 replaces a 29” five-color Heidelberg press. The installation represents Palmer’s entry into the 40” sheetfed marketplace, allowing the company to accept a wider range of work for its customers in local, regional, and nationwide markets. The 41-year-old printer is a second-generation family-owned business with 43 employees and boasts annual revenues of $9 million. President and CEO Steve Palmer notes that his company’s optimal use of automation in production processes enables Palmer Printing to maintain a better-than-average productivity rate per employee. The new LS540 supports this business philosophy with features like fully-automated plate changing, which makes for quick and seamless changeovers from one job to the next. Additionally, according to Palmer, Komori’s exacting color controls, including an inline PDC-S SpectroDensitometer, bring the press “up to color” quickly with reduced waste. 
“We compared Komori and three other major sheetfed press manufacturers,” Palmer said. “They’re all good manufacturers, but the Komori had an edge on all of them in terms of the automatic plate-changing. No one else offers this feature with the same level of automation.” He added, “We’ve been promoting our new, 40” capabilities for six months and have seen a drastic increase in requests for proposals from our customers.”
The 40” format of the new LS540 lets Palmer Printing produce multi-page booklets and other materials in the half the time, while the press’ automation also ties in to the company’s digital storefront and automated order and fulfillment services. At the same time, the very high image and color quality of the press supports the company’s specialty work in the creative sewing, granite and stone, and cosmetic and retail markets, all of which require exact color matching and image accuracy.