The Mitcham-based firm, which specialises in packaging, point-of-sale and advertising material for the music industry, hopes to keep more work in-house with its new digital offset portrait-format machine.

Managing director Steve Hodges (pictured) said the firm’s existing Xerox DocuColor presses, while fine on the short-run market, had proved unable to compete on longer runs.

He said: “They were fine when we were asked to produce up to 1,000 prints, but when they came back and wanted another 25,000, we couldn’t do it profitably.

“We did consider buying a conventional litho press, but we soon shied away from it because nobody at the
company had any offset experience. Quite frankly, the prospect scared the living daylights out of us.”

The 34DI prints speeds of 7,000 A3 sheets per hour and digitally images all four plates simultaneously on-press.

It can deliver up to 300lpi or FM screening for high-quality printing.