The firm, which runs HP Indigo and Xeikon digital print equipment as well as a 2.5m Zund flatbed UV printer, prints greetings cards for the UK market as well as local commercial work.

Managing director Rob Plampton said: "We were buying in hot melt for very short run paperback books, anything from 50 to 250 copies, but the quality wasn't good enough.

"The Ultrabind 2000 is a neat, tidy machine that does exactly what we want and we've got a good relationship with Duplo already - we've got a couple of DC-645s already and they look after us well on the servicing."

Plampton and colleague Andy Fothergill came to Ipex on Wednesday to look for a PUR binder and ended up testing the Duplo machine that day, before signing the contract on Thursday (27 March).

Plampton said he was not specifically looking to buy anything else at Ipex but added he was interested in "anything new and innovative".

The Ultrabind 2000 and its big brother the Ultrabind 6000 are built by an unnamed European manufacturer to Duplo's specification. Both products are being shown at Ipex for the first time.

The UltraBind 2000 is a manual set-up single-clamp perfect binder offering 290 cycles per hour (cph). It can bind products from 1-40mm thick in formats from 90x80mm up to 340mm by "any manageable height". It features a standard 20-minute start-up time and only requires a five-minute daily clean-up.