Installed in October for an investment of £5,500, the machine joins an identical P9000 which has been onsite at the Stockport repro house for around three years. Both of them run with a violet ink set to expand their colour gamut to 11 inks.
Both SureColors are run using OpenColor colour management software from GMG which includes MiniWedge capabilities with 39 swatches, making it small enough to position in the trim area of most kinds of jobs, as well as colour separation tools, which use actual press data when applying colour conversions to images.
Contact flexographic colour manager Mark Kay said: “We needed to take on a second Epson because of our growing amount of work and volume. The second one means we can take on a greater workload and also gives us a backup to swap one out if another goes down.
“It gives us more flexibility, as we are just getting busier and busier with the amount of work that is coming in. About 50% of our work has press-predicted proofs that go through our SureColors and we have never had any trouble whatsoever with our first Epson, so it was a no-brainer to get another exactly the same.
“We have dealt with GMG for donkeys’ years and they are a very good outfit – the industry standard for press-predicted proofs. Moving forward, we are very optimistic that we have a good year ahead. We doubled our turnover in the last couple of years, and expect to do so again in the next couple.”
Using PrecisionCore TFP printheads, the Epson SureColor P9000 prints at resolutions up to 2,880x1,440dpi. Its standard colour gamut comprises light black, light light black, photo black, matt black, cyan, light cyan, yellow, vivid magenta, vivid light magenta, orange and green.
Contact will use the Epson duo to serve a number of clients in the flexo sector. With 50 members of staff, the firm’s services include artwork and origination, plate manufacturing, and graphics management.
Contact Originators became the first corrugated company in the UK to invest in Esko XPS Crystal technology for flexo plate imaging just over a year ago, while at around the same time also introducing a pioneering 2.8m-wide flexo plate with 0.2mm register using its MagnaForma mounting software.
