The Sakurai Oliver will be installed late June and the 580SD the third quarter of this year. They will replace two conventional four and five colour plus coater presses.

The company has opted for this LED technology to do away with cleaning problems associated with spray powder, to dramatically reduce drying times, and to build on B&B’s reputation for environmentally friendly print by reducing power consumption.

“With the testing we have done, the sheets are completely dry when they come out the other side and ready for the next process,” reported business development director Dan Dean. “That’s particularly helpful for uncoated stocks, which inevitably present a massive drying problem. Every printer’s had experience of putting a job on folders or stitchers perhaps a day or two after being printed, and it still not being dry. But we’ll never have that again.”

Dean said this much shorter dryer time would enable B&B to better cater for “unavoidably urgent jobs”.

He added: “This is going to completely revolutionise the pressroom. Pressrooms historically have difficulty keeping things clean. Not having spray powder will really reduce wear and tear on bearings, gears and chains.”

The saving on power consumption would translate into an overall cost saving when LED UV ink costs come down, said Dean.

“Overall costs won’t be dramatically different in the short term as this saving will be balanced out by the higher ink costs. But in the long term these ink prices will come down,” he said.

The new presses will be used to process B&B’s range of public and private sector client work, including prospectuses, catalogues and brochures.

“We had a lot of people in Japan taking a long hard look at this technology and decided it was just a much simpler, straightforward technology,” said Dean. “We’re very pleased to be ahead of the curve on this.”