The Newhaven, East Sussex-based business bought the printers, which were installed last month, from M Partners Wide, the wide-format division of Surrey-based print equipment distributor M Partners.
The iPF 8400 is a 12-colour, 44-inch machine that Harwood King will use for its fine art print production and proofing. The iPF 815 is a five-colour 44-inch device which the firm will use for outputting film to create silkscreen originals.
The Canon printers have joined two aging Epson Stylus Pro machines that the firm will only continue to use for historical files that have been profiled and colour matched on those printers. The company also runs a number of traditional printmaking machines including etching and silkscreen presses.
“We’d been having some issues with our Epson printers which, for our application, were not easy to solve. The dimensional stability of the print coming out wasn’t absolutely accurate so if we wanted to put post-process silkscreen or etching on top of the print, we had a lot of trouble getting it in register,” said owner and managing director Quentin King.
“We’d spend hours cutting out bits of film and patching them over the output, then making the screen and doing it. It took many hours and what we wanted to do was get the film output and inkjet output much closer.
“We looked very carefully at what was available and after a few tests it looked like the Canon machines were doing a good job of doing that, particularly from machine-to-machine.”
The company has found that the internal memory on the iPF 8400 has significantly increased its productivity by holding ripped files in its memory. This has allowed the firm to go straight into print mode with full confidence that it will print successfully. It has also found the 12-colour system of the machine to be a huge advantage, particularly in the red spectrum.
“Colour, for fine art work, is so critical. The colour gamut and the stability of the system were both immediate advantages for us. The colour accuracy provides us with the biggest saving as we no longer have to spend hours fiddling with profiles to tweak them to get a colour just right,” said King.
The firm, which has six staff, has been producing fine art prints for artists and galleries across the world for more than 30 years. It specialises in giclee and silkscreen printing and has produced limited editions using up to 96 separately printed colours per print.
