The Nantwich company added to existing litho and digital operations buying a 2.5m-wide Anapurna M2500i high-speed hybrid inkjet printer, Acorta flatbed cutter and Asanti workflow solution from the Belgian-headquartered company, after managing director John McMillan was impressed by the image and colour quality produced by the machines.
For the first time since it was established in 1827, Johnsons has branched out from its packed Nantwich, Cheshire town-centre premises, so it could find room for the new equipment, buying a 280sqm industrial unit in nearby Crewe to add to its 1,115sqm space.
The new facility will enable Johnsons Printers to bring wide-format work in-house, the only part of the printing process it had previously contracted out.
Managing director John McMillan, who is also a photographer, said: “One of the things that’s really important to me is image quality. It wasn’t until I saw the image quality I required in HP Indigos that I decided to go digital.
“People were saying I was expecting too much from image quality on wide-format but when I saw the Anapurna I was very impressed. Then other factors like cost, range and speed started to tick more boxes.
“I also always said that I wouldn’t put a wide-format machine in unless we have a good cutting solution with it and the Acorta works for that.”
McMillan also liked the similarity of the Asanti RIP to Agfa’s Apogee RIP, which the 35-staff company uses for its litho kit.
High-quality colour matching was key to his decision to choose Agfa over rival brands, McMillan said.
“A lot of our customers are quite high end; they are brand managers and very colour critical and the bit of our work that’s always let us down is the large-format work,” he said.
“We understand the necessity of colour matching and are able to reproduce this whether a job is printed litho or digital. The task was to provide the same quality of service in the production of wide-format display material.
“When we went to Belgium this year we were so impressed with the Anapurna M2500i we went and bought a new factory to fit it in.”
The Anapurna can print up to 115sqm per hour as well as imaging two 1.2x1.5m boards side-by-side and the 2.5m wide roll-to-roll printing offers greater potential.
“The image on the Anapurna was superior to anything else we had seen but the missing element was colour management. A lot of Agfa’s competitors originally come from screen-printing, where a red is just a red. With this system it's as if a litho printer had designed the concept behind it.”
The suite started taking orders in September and has since then “gone berserk” McMillan said. It ran 24 hours a day for the first four days to complete one big job for a UK retail client. He expects as much as 20% of the company’s turnover could come from wide-format work in the future. It currently has a turnover approaching £3m but McMillan expects that to grow with the new facility.
“Whenever we’ve done anything like this in the past it’s worked out well,” he said.
The company, founded in 1827 by Thomas H Johnson and believed to be the oldest established business in Nantwich, offers a range of services from graphic design and litho and digital printing to direct mail. The main print works is located behind a Fujifilm photo shop, also part of the company.
