ProImage, an AGFA Company's ECO Ink Optimization Software Reduces Production Costs by $.55 per square foot.  

Princeton, N.J. – Canadian Newspaper Winnipeg Free Press in Winnipeg, Manitoba recently added ProImage’s OnColor ECO Ink Optimization Software to reduce ink consumption and ink cost on their press while improving print quality. 

The Winnipeg Free Press is the second largest city newspaper in Canada and prints over 85,000 daily newspapers and multiple commercial jobs. Their main objective was to save on ink and with the installation of ECO, they saw a whooping 33% reduction of ink in 2017 compared to 2016. This relates to an annual saving of over $213,000 as in 2016 they spent $610,000 on ink compared to $397,000 in 2017. Black ink went up by $2,500 but since black ink is more cost effective, the impact is minimal. The newspaper was able to gauge their ink savings by monitoring their consumables from 2016 versus 2017 and accounting for page count averages. They saw ink savings of 50,228 kg (110,733 lbs) and only a small increase of black ink by 1,469 kg (3,238 lbs) for the entire 12 months. With ProImage/AGFA’s new loyalty program their production costs was effectively reduced by $.55 per square foot.

OnColor ECO partially replaces cyan, magenta, and yellow colors in an image with black without compromising sharpness or quality. The conversion process reduces the overall ink volume required for printing. Cost reduction is achieved by both reducing the volume of the expensive color inks and replacing them with less expensive black ink, thus reducing the overall volume of inks used. 

Winnipeg Free Press already used ProImage NewsWay Workflow Software when ECO was installed and OnColor ECO integrates seamlessly with it. It appears as a device in the NewsWay Production Workflow and as it receives files from Asura, it hands them off to the RIPs after processing. When asked about the ease of use, Christine Fehler - Vice President of Operation for the Winnipeg Free Press - states that “it works like other NewsWay devices in which it can be applied or bypassed by a single mouse click right within the browser.” One of the major benefits of ECO for her and her team is the “good balance of ink savings and print quality the default settings provide” and she also remarks, the production “required no adjustments.”

Besides the tremendous ink savings reported, the print quality also improved. The paper reports cleaner press runs and less clogging, and results were more accurate to the digital PDF to the press than any other solution they evaluated.