Heidelberg Launches New Speedmaster CX 104

Heidelberger Druckmaschinen AG (Heidelberg) is presenting its latest world premiere – the new Speedmaster CX 104 – live at this year’s largest customer event, China Print from June 23-27 in Beijing, and also online at its simultaneous IT’S SHOWTIME! digital custom-er event.

Just one year after unveiling the drupa 2020 generation of presses, the company is show-casing the next product innovation in its core business of sheetfed offset printing.

The new 104 sheet format press offers commercial, packaging and label printing custom-ers access to cutting-edge sheetfed offset technology from Heidelberg with an outstanding price-performance ratio. When selecting equipment variants, these customers benefit from the system’s free scalability – which extends all the way through to Push to Stop functionality – and also from tailored configurations with as many as 15 printing/coating units.

“Heidelberg is investing in the industry’s future. With the new, intelligent Speedmaster CX 104, we’re making our customers and Heidelberg itself far more competitive,” says CEO Rainer Hundsdörfer. “We’ve developed the press for a broad cross-section of cus-tomers and a wide range of applications to target the vast market potential.”

To ensure makeready times are always kept short, the patented Intellistart 3 system au-tomatically determines the makeready processes required for the jobs to be produced. Intellistart 3 initiates the makeready process and carries it out automatically.

One highlight of the Speedmaster CX 104 is its new coating unit. It is based on XL technol-ogy, which places the focus on simplified operation, faster makeready, and a further im-provement in coating quality.

“Series production of the Speedmaster CX 104 has already started and anyone anywhere in the world who is interested in ordering the new press can do so,” said Florian Franken, the Heidelberg product manager responsible for the Speedmaster CX 104. “A number of European pilot customers in the various market segments are already working successful-ly with our new solution and are reporting productivity gains of up to 20%, which exceeds even our own expectations.”

To coincide with the market launch of the Speedmaster CX 104, Heidelberg is also unveil-ing the new Speedmaster CX 92. Like the Speedmaster CX 104, it benefits from a new er-gonomic design, the newly designed coating unit, and the innovations in the ink-ing/dampening unit.

This model, too, comes with the new Press Center generation and Intellistart 3 as stand-ard, with even the basic version offering a high level of flexibility and productivity. With the launch of Prinect Inpress Control 3 and Intelliline for the Speedmaster CX 92 autono-mous printing based on the Push to Stop philosophy is now possible for the first time – a step forward compared with the previous model. In addition to the cost-efficiency achieved by using 20% less printing plate material, process efficiency is also improved thanks to faster makeready and a reduction in waste. That makes the Speedmaster CX 92 the ideal press to meet the challenges associated with shorter runs on the commercial market.