“The whole premise of us adding the Mita products is about offering our clients a point of difference. Print, in its broadest sense – business cards and brochures, for example – is heavily exposed to commodity factors,” said Duplo UK managing director Peter Jolly.
“Whereas the kinds of books the Mita range can produce are high-margin, beautiful products that can be worth hundreds of pounds.”
The four products in the Mita range are the Mitafold, which automatically folds and creases photobook sections; the 70 cycles/min Mitamax, a lay-flat hot-melt glue unit, the seven books/min Mitabook is the range’s automatic casing-in unit designed for short-run, hardcover books; and the eight cases/min Mitacase is an automatic hardcover manufacturing unit.
The Mitafold has a top speed of 10,000sph and can handle sheets of up to 450x900mm. Mitamax can glue signatures of up to 380x330mm, while the Mitabook can handle book blocks of up to 20mm thick.
The Italian and German-built Mita systems are manually fed, fully automatic units that, according to Jolly, are designed to plug the gap between slow semi-automatic hardcover systems and expensive, high volume full production systems.
The four Mita units work offline and are priced between £80,000 and £200,000.
The range was previously available through IFS.
According to Jolly, while there are comparable systems available, they are typically either more expensive systems aimed at higher volumes or require several books to be run through to get a sellable product.
“The Mita range on the other hand is first book in, first book out, which is critical when you’re manufacturing high-value products” he added.
“These are high-end products, designed for the top 10% photobook providers, but also commercial printers looking to offer their clients high-value, high production-value, bound books,” said Jolly.
The Mitamax gluing unit will be demonstrated at Duplo’s upcoming London Calling 5i event at Somerset House from 26 to 27 November.
According to Jolly, visitor registrations for the event are already 45% higher than at the same time for last year’s event, which was attended by almost 240 people from 157 companies.
