The Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire-based business installed the machine, its third Riso, at its 560sqm premises last month, and managing director Elisabeth Glasper said it had already made quite an impact, being Ciconi’s only cut-sheet machine that prints in more than four colours.

Ciconi has already budgeted to invest in a second 9630 before the end of its financial year, along with another insertion machine and additional resources.

The machine, which was first shown at Drupa 2016 but was given its first UK showing at March’s PrintWeekLive! event, uses Forcejet single-pass inkjet technology with a five-colour (CMYK plus grey) ink set. At 160ppm, Japanese manufacturer Riso says it is the world’s fastest cut-sheet printer. 

Riso confirmed that 26-staff Ciconi is one of the first three UK installations. 

Glasper said: “We’ve been using Riso for quite a while now and the GD9630 gives us a bit more flexibility on getting different colours out of it that the others don’t.

“The GD is all about the colour depth and taking it really close to litho. The standard Risos are perfect for billing, but on this Riso you can give the colours more depth.”

The machine has been configured with two high-capacity feeders and a high-capacity stacker. Unlike Ciconi’s older Riso machines, it uses an EFI Fiery digital front-end, printing at 600dpi resolution on paper sized 340x550mm maximum. Glasper said it is mainly intended for variable print runs of between 1,000 and 50,000 mailings. 

She added: “You’ve got digital printing, which will give top notch quality but is expensive, then you’ve got litho, and then you have other organisations doing inkjet solutions, but what Riso has done is come up with a machine that hits a market where you can do short-run variable print and chomp away at a job fast.”

£2.3m-turnover Ciconi also runs two Canon imagePress C6011 presses, along with finishing equipment. It offers a wide variety of print and mailing services, along with design, data management and storage and fulfilment.