The Shifnal, Shropshire-based company installed the circa £30,000 machine on 15 February, replacing a Xerox 700i production printer. It was supplied by Xerox reseller Zerographic Systems, which recently appointed Mike Holyoake, the former head of Xerox’s UK graphics business, as its new group sales director. 

Badger managing director Chris Taylor was particularly impressed with the machine’s Simple Image Quality Adjustment (SIQA) tool, which he said allowed for accurate duplexing.

“We were an old-fashioned conventional litho printer and went into digital seven years ago and it just continues to grow as litho shrinks,” said Taylor. 

“Digital and large-format are replacing the shortfall. Volumes are climbing and we need to produce quicker.”

Launched in 2015 as a “strategic replacement” for the C75 and J75 models, the Versant runs at 80ppm and can maintain speeds on all stocks up to 350gsm, delivering image quality of 2,400dpi. It can handle a variety of media types with a compact Belt Fuser system and Xerox’s low-melt (EA) toner. 

Taylor said he had been considering replacing one of Badger’s two other Xerox 700i machines with another Versant in a year's time, but due to the enhanced productivity of the Versant was now considering both 700is with a single machine.

He added: “What tends to happen is you improve in an area and it shifts the bottleneck further down, you’re always on this constant move. We spent about £200,000 on finishing in the last two years because bottlenecks keep moving around.” 

Last year, Badger invested in a guillotine, folder and bookletmaker, along with a 1.6m-wide Roland wide-format machine. 

On the litho side, it runs two 25-year-old Heidelberg machines, one single-colour and one two-colour, that have not been replaced since Taylor founded the business in 1987. The six-staff outfit has sales of around £500,000.

It produces a wide variety of commercial work, along with banners and signs.