October 03, 2005 - Duplo Corporation (Sagamihara, Japan) today announced that it is implementing a fully automated finishing strategy based on industry standard JDF to work with HP Indigo digital presses. The first devices under this strategy are a near-line booklet making solution and a near-line slit–cut–crease device for flatwork. 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 HP Indigo sheet-fed digital presses. It consists of a feeding station with two feed trays, a slitting, cutting and creasing module, a booklet maker and face trimmer. The slit–cut–crease device, known as the DC-645, can place up to fifteen creases and/or fifteen cuts across the sheet and six slits along the length of the sheet. It is ideal for automating the production of business cards, greeting cards, postcards, point-of-sales material and other marketing collateral. In late August a reference sale agreement was signed in Rehovot, Israel, under the terms of which Duplo and HP will co-market the products. The two units were both shown on the HP booth at the recent Print 05 show in Chicago. “Through our products and services, we are committed to increasing productivity in the finishing environment of production digital colour printing,” said Dominic Quennell, vice president of global marketing at Duplo Corporation. “Working with the HP Indigo presses, the PDC Finisher and the DC-645 incorporate a closed-loop workflow to create an effective and efficient near line finishing process. The high level of interest in the Duplo finishing solutions at Print 05 proved the value of dedicated near-line solutions for digital print.” “Automating the finishing process based on the emerging JDF standard is becoming an increasingly important focus of the digital publishing industry,” said Yishai Amir, strategic marketing director, Indigo division, HP. “Commercial printers will be able to take advantage of an end-to-end solution that features Duplo finishing products and is compatible with HP Indigo digital presses - automating the finishing process from job submission to finished product.” The PDC Finisher feeder is loaded with electronically collated jobs printed on the HP Indigo sheet-fed digital presses. 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 DC-645 accepts sheets from the HP Indigo sheet fed presses and then sets up automatically either under the control of a bar code which refers back to a pre-input memory or by extracting the data from a JDF job ticket. The sheets are slit, cut and creased as required, in one pass. An optional dedicated business card module provides ten slits for full bleed business cards printed 20-up on an SRA3 or 12” x 18” sheet. The DC-645 will be exhibited on the HP booth at the forthcoming JGAS exhibition in Tokyo, Japan October 4th – 8th) finishing a wide range of applications. On the Duplo booth, several booklet applications printed on the HP Indigo presses will be finished.