The machine, which replaced an ageing Epson device, was installed at the West Midlands-based firm’s premises "in the past few months". It was bought to provide proofs for the company’s Xeikon label printing presses.
The imagePrograf iPF 6450 provides up to 12-colour printing with a media width of 24in. It has been purchased complete with a built-in spectrophotometer for complete colour matching.
“We became so reliant on our old Epson that when it broke down we had to replace it straight away. When we print something we have to make sure that the colours are correct. The machine also allows us to do a quick press proof for customers,” said CS Labels studio manager Neil Churchill.
The firm bought the printer from M Partners Wide, the wide-format division of Surrey-based print equipment distributor M Partners.
“Having read good reports of Canon products, we requested prints from some of our sample files and the results were outstanding. The colour quality from Canon was extremely impressive,” said Churchill.
“We also looked at Epson, as it’s the industry standard proofer, but we were shown this by M Partners Wide and we found it to be a far superior machine.”
M Partners Wide installed the machine on an extended trial for CS Labels and it passed all of the firm’s job tests.
“The M Partners Wide experts were able to produce profiles for us so that we could match the output from our Xeikon machines exactly,” said Churchill.
“At one time we would have proofed very colour critical jobs on the Xeikon label printer but that is expensive, both in terms of machine time and substrates. It is faster to proof the work on the Canon,” said Churchill.
CS Labels managing director Simon Smith added: “I was very taken with Canon’s ability to provide machine-to-machine colour accuracy. It means that we could place a printer into a customer site and send them files to print out with total confidence.”
CS Labels, which has more than 30 staff and a turnover of around £3m, produces digital barcode, personalised, variable data, custom and security labels for customers in a wide range of industries.
