The Devon-based printer, which also purchased a Polar guillotine last year, is in the process of upgrading its pre-press to cope with the increase in throughput at its Barnstable production facility.

General manager Ian Hobbs told PrintWeek: "We had a 15-year-old Agfa system that didn’t do automated imposition or pre-flighting – a lot of the designers we use send RGB images, so being able to check and convert those to CMYK is a big time-saver.

"The next thing is to upgrade our old Agfa Palladio to chemistry-free CTP. We’ll probably look at Heidelberg for that because it will integrate with Prinect without the need for any link-up software and we have had excellent service from them."

Blue Sky Print has seen a dramatic increase in the amount of work printed in-house in the past six months, since upgrading from a two-colour to a five-colour SM74 - so much so that it is looking to move from flexible single to double day shifts.

“We have a very good old-school printer who could produce quality four-colour work on a two–colour press, so we did produce some four-colour work in-house before the upgrade, but now that we’ve got the five-colour we’re obviously able to print a lot more ourselves," said Hobbs. "Over 90% of the work we used to outsource we now do in-house."

Commenting on the upcoming shift pattern change, Hobbs said: "This month has been fantastic and if it continues like this the shift change will be imminent."