The Willerby, Yorkshire-headquartered outfit purchased two Xerox machines: a Xerox Versant 2100 and Xerox iGen 5, which will replace two older iGen 3 presses. They join three pre-existing Xerox presses at the Brighton site: two Nuvera 288 mono presses and an iGen 150.

The iGen 5 cost around £320,000 and the Versant cost around £80,000.

The investment takes total Imagedata 2016 hardware spending up to around £1.5m, after the company bought an Inca Onset X3 wide-format printer in February at a cost of £1m for its Howden factory.

Imagedata operations director Jason Vivian said that after a series of meetings between Imagedata chief executive David Danforth, chairman Roger Birkin and Xerox in the early part of this year, an agreement was reached at Drupa, and the two machines were up-and-running by 28 November.

Vivian said: “Historically, we continually evaluate the latest developments in the print equipment marketplace and we viewed these two machines to be the best options for our current and future requirements."

He added that the iGen 5’s 364x660mm maximum sheet size will enable Imagedata to print new applications, such as landscape and six-page A4 brochures.

Launched last year as Xerox’s first digital press to have an optional fifth colour (orange, green or blue), the iGen 5 prints around 30% faster than the iGen 3, at 150ppm. The device has a resolution of 2,400dpi and can handle coated, uncoated, textured and speciality stocks of 50-350gsm.

"With the iGen 3s there is a lot of operator maintenance that needs to be done to get colour to a certain speed,” added Vivian.

“We spend more time than I’d like doing manual adjustments to the presses just to make sure we are at attainable levels but a lot of that now is incorporated into the iGen 5, so it’s done on the fly by the press.”

The SRA3 digital toner Versant 2100 prints duplex on a range of substrates at weights ranging between 52gsm and 350gsm. It prints A4 at a maximum speed of 100ppm and has a resolution of 2,400dpi. 

“I wasn’t really aware of the Versant before but I was pleasantly surprised, bearing in mind it has replaced an iGen 3, it has been more productive and much better quality; we’re running it at around 2,800 A4 impressions per hour," added Vivian. 

Imagedata Group, which was founded in 1982, has 230 staff and a turnover of £22m. The business produces items including POS and display materials for a number of major retailers as well as corporate and public sectors.