The print and design specialist took delivery of the machine at its 465sqm Wimbledon, South London site just before Christmas.

Bought direct from Xerox, it has replaced a Ricoh Pro C9100 that was coming up to the end of its lease.

The iGen5 offers production colour printing with CMYK plus a fifth print station for gamut extension or speciality effects.

Aquatint CEO Roger Severn told Printweek: “We’ve recently started doing photobooks as a new business venture, in partnership with somebody else, and our old process was struggling with that.

“We initially went to Xerox to talk about workflow systems. We were talking about FreeFlow with them, which we thought could resolve some of the issues that we had, but from that we thought the next logical step was to look around [at machinery] and see what’s what.”

The business weighed up alternatives from various suppliers but found the iGen5 to be best suited to its requirements in terms of capability and price.

“Xerox responded very quickly to what we were looking for and came up with a few ideas. We looked at a range of their machines and settled on the iGen,” said Severn, who added the machine has proven “remarkably versatile” and opened up new avenues for the business.

The FreeFlow Core software will enable the company to become “far more automated with what we do”, Severn added, enabling it to cut out various touchpoints and double handling of jobs.

The business has previously placed litho work at its sister company College Hill Print, which runs a B2 Komori press, but will now be able to bring some of those jobs in-house to run on the iGen5.

“Being able to convert more work from litho to digital is one of the big opportunities for us,” said Severn.

“In particular we do a lot of packaging, so if that starts taking off then the ability to do some heavier weight packaging with the iGen will be great. And for special colours it will maybe be nice to get the fifth colour in there. Right now we want to focus on getting the volume up and running, but we can certainly see an opportunity for us wanting to use those features.”

The business also installed a Unibind Casemaker 750A from Peleman last summer, for the production of custom personalised hard covers. Its total investment in the iGen5, the Unibind kit and other recent upgrades has come to around £210,000.

19 staff work at Aquatint, which turns over just over £2m, while College Hill Print employs 12 staff making a similar turnover.