Springfield operations director Dennis Ebeltoft visited Screen’s Ipex stand (N4-C330) yesterday (Monday 24 March) to sign off the £570,000 press, which went in to full production last week.

According to Ebeltoft the investment was driven by the circa £7m turnover company’s need to increase capacity following significant sales growth at the Hull-based business, achieving 26% year-on-year growth in 2013 alone.

“We’ve been looking at inkjet technology for a good two years and we now feel that the quality is very close to what we have with the HP [toner] technology, but the speed is superb and I would suspect that this one machine almost doubles our digital capacity,” said Ebeltoft.

The Truepress will run alongside Springfield’s three HP Indigo machines. However, following the installation of the Truepress the all-digital company has been able to switch from a triple shift system to double-day this week.

The firm typically produces around 1,500 jobs a month, with typical run lengths of circa 300 metres, although according to Ebeltoft run lengths can go as high as 10,000 metres.

The 50m/min press, which runs high-opacity white, has been configured with an Esko digital front end and Springfield is using GMG colour management tools to maintain consistency on the Truepress and Indigos across a wide range of substrates from paper and foils to PP and PET films.

“Springfield has huge confidence in how the press can expand production capacity and enable it to develop new label products and open up new creative opportunities,” said Screen Europe president Brian Filler.

Following the investment in the Trupress, which was launched at Labelexpo last September,  Ebeltoft said the firm is also about to start beta testing a dynamically linked inline finishing system for the press from an unnamed manufacturer.

Springfield is ISO 9001, 14001 and BRC/IOP accredited and runs its machines with Fogra 39L proofing certification.