The Rishton, Lancashire-based family-owned business installed the machine around two weeks ago and partner and general manager Jane Caunce said it is already making a huge difference to productivity levels. 

It replaces an eight-year-old Konica Minolta bizhub Pro C6500. List price for the new machine is around £40,000.

“The machine itself is a higher production level than what we had before due to running speeds," said Caunce.

“The C6500 was a really good machine, still good the day we got rid of it, print quality was fantastic, but it was starting to need more attention and costing too much to run. Click charge was getting a bit too high; we wanted to make sure we were at the top of the quality ladder and wanted to utilise the extra length possible with this new Konica Minolta.

“It can do things like six-page A4 brochures and A4 landscape brochures. The quality kind of blew us away and that’s probably the reason. It was time to move on, upgrade and invest.” 

The four-colour AccurioPress runs at up to 61 A4ppm at maximum 1,200dpi resolution. It takes a variety of stocks weighing between 62gsm and 350gsm and Ellison's machine is configured with the capacity to take sheets sized 320mmx1.2m.

“We like the fact that it doesn’t slow down too much on thicker stock, we like that it duplexes at a higher grammage and the registration is a huge thing. Colour reproduction and skin tones are also really good,” added Caunce.

The machine can be configured with a number of optional finishing units, including a paper feeding unit, a bookletmaking unit and a punching and folding unit, but Caunce chose not to configure with any additional units and rely on Ellison’s in-house finishing equipment instead.

It joins a number of litho and wide-format kit in Ellison’s print room, including a print and cut machine. The firm, which was founded by Caunce's parents Fred and Hazel Ellison in 1971, also has a design studio.