There are already about 12 to 15 newspaper organizations that have installed UV for printing full saturation color on high brightness or glazed newsprint on their presses. Used for full page advertising on the outer pages of main sections and inserts, there are about 40 to 50 systems in place. Systems from Prime, IST and GEW dominate the newspaper UV installations across the country, although some large newspapers have also tried to fabricate and assemble their own systems by sourcing lamps, power supplies, reflectors, large air purifier and cooling system components.
Recent sales of UV systems that come to mind include the sale of several IST systems to Bennett Coleman for their double-width manroland presses in the Sahihabad plant and the sale of three Prime systems for Lokmat in Maharashtra. Lokmat has installed one of the new Prime UV systems on an NBG Offset press in Pune where apart from its own Marathi daily, it will also be printing The Hindustan Times in English for the HT Media Group.
The price of UV systems and UV inks is nevertheless inhibiting the growth of UV in the newspapers. For large circulation dailies published from multiple centers, even the cost of glazed newsprint is a factor to be considered when the advertising premium for glossy output is not really rising. Though locally assembled UV systems can work and are less expensive, even amongst the imported UV systems there is a considerable range of prices. However, if a newspaper is looking for high performance and reliability, it should not underestimate the technology inputs and complexity of the best systems.
There is a high level of expectation for LED UV systems but their application in daily newspapers may take more time simply because of the higher costs of LED UV inks, which cannot yet be easily justified by the premium that glossy color pages bring. While the Indian language newspapers are still growing in circulation, their ad rates are still at a discount compared to the large English national dailies and yield per page has become the mantra for all dailies in a very competitive environment.
Nevertheless, the lower energy costs and longer lamp life of LED UV curing systems are of interest as the expectation of ink prices becoming lower. One possibility, of course, is to buy systems that offer plug-and-play change from conventional UV to LED UV curing simply by changing the lamp within the same power supply, reflector and cooling assembly. IST Metz offers such an option as do GEW and the Greater Noida based UV Graphic Technologies, which is well known for its retrofits. Another upgrade path that cannot be ruled out are multi-wave UV systems that can adapt their radiation to cure a wide range of fit-to-purpose UV inks.
