With a set-up cost of 50p it provides a cost-effective way to produce both spot and flood coats, particularly for short-run and digital work.

The versatile Dryprint machine, which is based on digital duplicator technology, can be run as a printer in one or two colours, as a single-colour print and coat unit or as a coater only. For security print applications a taggant can be added to either the ink or the varnish.

"Lot of printers are doing some spot colour or overprint work that they don't need to go to the expense of putting onto a four-colour digital press to produce," said Dryprint managing director Keith Wells.

He added that the UV curing employed by Dryprint for both ink and coating made it a different proposition to standard digital duplicating.

"As soon as you talk about duplicators, people imagine dot gain, sett off and smearing, but with UV-curing they're not issues."

The £40,000 SRA3 machine runs at 6,000sph. It is made up of a printing unit with suction feeder, inline UV lamps and delivery and a separate platemaker that is used to produce the paper plates used in the process. For spot coating, registration is +/- 0.25mm.

In addition to paper, the machine can also use synthetic substrates including Tyvek and Teslin.

Dryprint is also working with Caslon to produce a system for Braille printing.