Mihara is a coastal town about an hour away from Hiroshima. Mitsubishi Heavy Industry’s commercial press manufacturing, assembly Mihara is a coastal town about an hour away from Hiroshima. Mitsubishi Heavy Industry's commercial press manufacturing, assembly and testing take up several buildings within a sprawling plant that is like a township, and to see the newspaper web division one has to drive out of the main plant and reach another sprawling plant that is across a bay. This is a company that makes, among many other products, light rail transportation systems, nuclear power plants, paper manufacturing equipment, cars, and even owns Nikon.

Mitsubishi is also the largest offset press manufacturer in Japan making sheetfed presses, commercial heatset web presses, and coldset newspaper presses with speeds up to 90,000 copies an hour. From our visit it became clear that this is an engineering company run by engineers. Mitsubishi has always leveraged technology and its presses have always been leaders in speed and automation.

Koji Okubo, deputy general manager of the international sales department showed us the commercial sheetfed and web manufacturing and testing facilities. The scale of the integrated manufacturing plant is staggering, with very large machining centres that seem to be able to produce cylinders not just for offset presses but maybe even large enough for paper machines. The famous Japanese machine tool capability becomes visible with steel rails embedded in the floor. These are for x and y movement of heavy components that could include sideframes and cylinders of presses. Not surprisingly, given the company's heavy engineering heritage, the plant resembles a factory for railway engines.

Koji Okubo shows us a new Diamond 3000 carton press that has been designed for printing cartons for luxury brands such as Bulgari. The press is capable of printing and coating board on both sides with interstage and end of press UV curing. He also tells us about the new Mitsubishi fully automatic simulchange plate changer that can change all the plates at once no matter how many units a press has, in a maximum time of 75 seconds.

MCCS-V
Mitsubishi's colour control systems use sheet scanning and spectroscopy to provide accurate colour control of print and also advanced colour management by converting measured values into ICC profiles for feedback to the prepress stage. These profiles can be used to standardise colour taking into account press variation when displaying colours on prepress monitors or making digital inkjet proofs.

We were told about the new MCCS-V system, which works without the need for colour patches and is available for both the sheetfed and Mitsubishi's commercial heatset and coldset newspaper presses. On web presses it can decrease wastage by as much as 33 per cent and it can reduce the colour density difference between the front and back by as much as 55 per cent. This kind of technology is an option and there are other new leading edge press and colour control technologies from Mitsubishi such as the Diamond Color Navigator and the Diamond Eye that have been talked about at such events as Ifra Amsterdam last year. Already available on newspaper web presses, Mitsubishi will show the Diamond Eye technology on a commercial heatset web at IGAS in Tokyo this September.

Perfecting
Mitsubishi is also the only manufacturer that makes all three kinds of sheetfed perfecting presses. It manufactures the traditional long convertible perfectors where one side of the paper is printed, then tumbled over and printed on the backside. It also manufactures the stack type perfecting press in which the print units alternate in printing the top and bottom of the sheet in one pass — a design often favoured in Japan for its space saving benefits.

Mitsubishi is most keen about its unique tandem perfector, which is a long press in which the reverse and front side printing units are arranged in line and connected by a translink unit. The translink unit is highly accurate and mechanically reduces both fanout and doubling.

The Daimond 3000TP tandem perfector uses only one gripper edge and can print both thin and thick sheets on both sides at the full speed of 13000 sheets an hour. The Diamond TP is available as a standard press for sheets from .04 to .6 mm thickness, or in carton press model that accommodates sheets in the .2 to .8 mm thickness range.

From our visit it is clear to us that Mitsubishi is very advanced in its research and development and in its engineering design and integrated manufacturing capabilities. Its offset presses are as advanced if not more advanced than those any of other press manufacturer. We are looking forward to seeing the new features and product design and styling of the Diamond V 3000 to be shown at IGAS in Tokyo.

Web presses
We had an opportunity to see at close hand the Diamond 16 Max commercial heatset web press that is offered with variable and changeable circumference cylinders and folder. We also saw a Diamondstar 90,000 impressions an hour press that was being tested by a Japanese newspaper prior to delivery. We will report on these in subsequent issues.