May 4th, 2004 - Duplo Corporation (Sagamihara, Japan) today has announced it is working with HP to implement a fully automated finishing strategy based on industry standard JDF. The first device under this strategy is a near-line booklet making solution, which is being launched at drupa 2004 and will be released in September 2004. Duplo and HP also intend to sign a co-marketing agreement for the near-line booklet finishing solution. The booklet making solution, known as the Production Digital Colour Finisher (PDC Finisher), produces full bleed trimmed booklets ready for delivery in one pass off an HP Indigo sheet-fed digital press. It consists of a feeding station with two feed trays, a slitting, cutting and creasing module, a booklet maker and face trimmer. “Through our products and services, we are committed to increasing productivity in the finishing environment of production digital colour printing,” says Dominic Quennell, vice president of global marketing at Duplo Corporation. “Working with the HP Indigo presses, the PDC Finisher incorporates a closed-loop workflow to create an effective and efficient near- line finishing process.” The new booklet maker provides three distinct productivity advantages over current off-line solutions: - Efficiently finishes any size run of booklets automatically, including those with variable sheet counts from booklet to booklet. This assures that every electronically collated set from an HP Indigo digital press is finished exactly as intended. - Verifies job completion by detecting the presence of individual sheets while finishing and automatically stops and alerts the operator if any single sheet is missing or oriented incorrectly. - Verifies product integrity of variable data finished booklets by tracking each finished set. This unique feature automates a critical step in the production of variable data print projects, assuring that each individual job is accounted for and that it contains the intended page count and individualized contents – even when each page is unique. “Automating the finishing process based on the emerging JDF standard is becoming an increasingly important focus of the digital publishing industry,” states HP Indigo division product marketing manager Eli Israeli. “To meet this need, HP is working with Duplo to provide customers with an end-to-end solution that is compatible with our line of HP Indigo digital presses that automates the finishing process from job submission to finished product.” Electronically collated jobs printed on the HP Indigo sheet-fed digital presses are loaded into the feeder and then the sheets are fed in sequence through the slitting, cutting and creasing module to the booklet maker. The sheets are immediately side slit and creased, which eliminates the problem of cracking on the fold line. The feeding sequence can be determined either by simple sheet count, by OMR marks or barcodes printed on the sheets. The feeding sequence provides full sheet and set integrity, which enables a closed-loop workflow. The bookletmaker and trimmer are the Duplo DBM-500 series units launched at the IGAS show in Tokyo in September 2003. These units are Duplo’s fourth generation of high-speed, heavy-duty dynamic bookletmakers and have been designed specifically with the digital print market in mind. With fully automatic format change and function set-up, the entire PDC Finisher system has been designed by Duplo from the outset to be compatible with the UP3i communication standard, which in turn has been developed in association with the CIP4 group. The PDC Finisher is designed to provide a dependable and productive solution to the growing requirement for full-bleed trimmed booklets, which have been printed on digital colour presses. The PDC Finisher is being exhibited at drupa on the Duplo stand (Hall 13 C38) and on the HP stand (Hall 4 C23/D47).