Replacing an end-of-life four-colour Xerox Versant 2100, the six-colour toner press – fitted with CMYK and two of its Silver, Gold, Clear, White and fluorescent Pink channels at any one time – has opened up a huge colour gamut for the three-man firm since its late December installation, allowing EA to target niche business even more effectively.
Despite having never worked directly with Fujifilm, and the company being a newcomer to direct toner sales in the UK, hands-on founders Matt Saulsbury and David Kennedy were confident in the new Revoria.
Saulsbury said: “We’d never dealt with Fujifilm before, because until recently they haven’t been directly involved in the toner market in the UK. Though of course, as everyone knows, Fujifilm-made digital toner presses have been around for a long time, and we’d been using one ourselves for a number of years.
“I’d always been very impressed with the technology, so when I started seeing a few articles in the trade press about Fujifilm entering the toner market directly in the UK, I was interested. I know the quality of their products and I liked the idea of working with them directly.
“Ultimately it was a visit from a Fujifilm wide-format sales rep that really got the ball rolling. He came to talk to us about wide-format, but we quickly got talking about Revoria, and it all went from there.”
Speaking to Printweek, Kennedy added: “We went to their demonstration site, and it was very slick, very organised. They had direction and clarity, and it filled us with confidence: you could see their excitement and passion to get involved.”
That passion has translated into the manufacturer’s customer service, Kennedy said. Though there have been few issues in the months following the install, the team is confident that – in the rare case it is unable to fix a problem itself – Fujifilm will answer the phone, even out of hours.
“Sometimes you need some flexibility – and [with Fujifilm] you know that they care, and they’ll bend over backwards to help. That’s very important for a small business like ours,” he added.
EA, established in 2011, specialises in boutique applications, taking advantage of its wide range of embellishment gear – including a Vivid Matrix digital foiler and Heidelberg platen for traditional foiling, as well as an SRA3 letterpress machine – to make high-value niche products.
Put straight to work, the new press has helped EA stand out to its customers, with the wide gamut helping the firm reach previously inaccessible work.
Saulsbury said: “We really liked the fact that it had a white ink option, with all the requests we get now for printing on dark or coloured board. We’d also immediately seen the potential for the gold and silver ink options to win us high value work with metallic effects.
“But, somewhat to our surprise, the biggest advantage so far has been the pink ink – which has already won us some greetings cards work. The creative agency sourcing the greetings cards needed a print supplier who could produce fluorescent colours, and the florescent pink we can achieve on the PC1120 was exactly right for what they needed.
“The other advantage of the pink, from a much more practical point of view, is that we can now match far more pantone colours than we could before. We’re always getting customers bringing slightly unusual colours to us and asking if we can match them. With the pink, we can do that far more now than we could before.”
Kennedy added: “We get the niche jobs, things that are hard to understand, or are complicated. We’re not like Model T Fords, where you could have any colour you wanted, as long as it was black – we cater for stuff out of the ordinary.”
