Summary

A high level of waste, caused among other things by inaccurate counting of the newspaper copies, is no longer accepted today. Counting inaccuracy increases the financial loss caused by production overrun and removed copies. The smaller the production run is, the higher the proportional financial losses will be for the manufacturer. Nor is lowering the costs the only reason to increase the counting quality the trend towards the personalised and customised newspaper makes exact copy counting essential. Some of the various copy counters have proven their suitability or otherwise for the newspaper industry in practical applications, but there continue to be a great many unsolved problems. In the past, the application of copy counting was usually confined to counting the numbers of copies in order to control the stacker. Recently, however, it has become increasingly commonplace to work with several counters in a processing line and to interconnect them, also with other processing lines. This is necessary also in order to control and supervise the overall production. This IFRA Special Report describes the different methods of counting newspaper copies. Included is information about the equipment that is available on the ,market as well as descriptions of their installation. We hope that this information will help resolve the problems that continue to exist in copy counting, by explaining the iqterrelations to the users and by drawing the attention of the manufacturers to development possibilities.