News Limited’s Printers Place site in Darwin will take delivery of the four-colour KBA Comet next September, which will be accommodated with an annexe to its main building.

NT News production manager Bart Irwin told ProPrint the Comet would replace a Uniman 2/2 machine on the floor.

“We’re at breaking point with the News. Most of our existing equipment was installed in 1985,” he said.

“The Uniman was never designed for four-colour work, though we’ve adapted it as best we can.”

Irwin said the company had been using a “mixture of four-colour spot and mono” with the Uniman, but would be able to produce 64 pages in full-colour with the Comet.

He also said the increased capacity would allow the plant to produce each Sunday to Friday edition in a single run, and produce the Saturday edition in three runs instead of five runs.

The news comes as the media giant nears completion of a $52m upgrade to its Townsville printing plant which will allow the site to produce full-colour editions of its newspapers for the first time.

The machine to be installed at Darwin is also the same as that installed at News Limited’s Hobart facility last year.

“The expansion of colour throughout the group has been enormous,” Irwin observed.

“Standards of quality have risen, and the regionals are catching up with that technology.”

In addition to producing the flagship Northern Territory News, the Printers Place site also produces News publications such as the Sunday Territorian and Palmerston Sun, as well as the Fairfax-owned Katherine Times and WAN-owned Kimberley Echo.

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