Subject line: Cutting edge colour printing no matter how you spell it!
We sent this message last year to remind customers that the heart of what we do is print beautiful color books. That has not changed!!! What has changed? Timing and pricing. For much of 2022 we were faced with long lead times for materials and almost constantly escalating prices on those same materials. For 2023, prices have stabilized, lead times are back to normal, and we have increased capacity. The result is we can deliver color books with quicker schedules to our customers. So regardless of which way you spell it we can produce it.
Color for our American customers, Colour for our English-speaking Canadian customers, and Couleur for our French speaking customers in the various provinces in Canada. We use a fair amount of skilled labor or labour to run our sheet fed colour or digital color presses at our plants in Altona. Regardless of the spelling, couleur printing has been at the heart of Friesens printing business for many years.
With recent world events we have had renewed interest in colour printing for the North American market. Printing that might have gone to China or Europe has come back to North America to work around shipping and travel issues. As such we thought a refresher on what we can offer would be worthwhile.
In terms of equipment, we have 6 sheet fed presses dedicated to book printing. This includes one of the largest sheet-fed press in the world dedicated to book production. Our Manroland 900XXL 73” 8 color perfecting press is a workhorse and is competitive at the low end of web production with sheet fed quality.
We recently introduced LED drying as an option with our Manroland Evolution R708P LED color perfecting press. With LED the risk of chemical ghosting and marking is greatly reduced, so the sheets come off the press and are bound with no drying time.
Our Heidelberg XL 75 29# 5 color press and two MGI Jet varnish machines combine to give even the most detailed covers the treatments you are looking for to make your books standout on the shelf.
The newest press we have is an HP Indigo 50000, offset digital roll 4 color press which takes digital printing a step beyond and is almost indistinguishable from traditional sheet fed. This makes high quality color possible in short runs.
All of these presses feed a state of the art heavily modernized binding facility that can produce hard or soft cover books.
We offer prepress services and a wide range of paper options; we are seeing relatively stable prices with core materials and expect this to continue in 2023.
So, if you are publishing Cookbooks, Photographic Books, Museum Catalogues, Travel Guides or Calendars, Friesens can be your North American Color/Colour/Colueur printer.