An unnamed European commercial printer will take delivery of the beta press in January 2016, around four months before the full commercial launch of the press is due to take place at Drupa in Düsseldorf, Germany from 31 May to 10 June.

“The customer has signed the beta contract and is happy with the quality of the machine,” said Business Solutions Europe head of market development Mark Hinder, who added that interest in the machine globally had been immense.

“We’re now into our element of it, which is the commercial running to make sure that everything we anticipate from the product when we go to launch will be maintained during the beta phase.

“The customer is a commercial offset business that is looking to move work from offset onto digital. They’ve never done it before with any of the other manufacturers because they’ve never been satisfied before that there’s been a digital press out there that can produce the litho quality that they’re getting at the moment.”

Hinder added that the customer has been working with Konica Minolta for around eight months, during which the manufacturer has carried out application testing and run various samples on different substrates profiled to the customer’s business.

“They came to Japan to see the research and development that the inkjet team are doing and flew back with the feeling that it’s a product they want to invest in in the future, subject to the testing that they’ll do under the beta conditions,” said Hinder.

“Run lengths are coming down, the number of jobs are increasing and the KM-1 will enable them to print on a wider range of substrates and move into the packaging market as well.”

The first KM-1 beta was installed in the US three months ago at an undisclosed customer with global operations.

The KM-1 was first shown in concept form at Drupa 2012. The machine, which uses Konica Minolta’s UV CMYK inks and Piezo Shear mode printhead technology, can also handle a 585x750mm media size and media thickness from 0.06 to 0.6mm.

According to the manufacturer, output speeds of up to 3,000sph, as well as 1,200x1,200dpi resolution, will make the press suitable for high-speed commercial printing, for producing short print runs to tight deadlines and processing variable data.

Konica Minolta has also strengthened its business development programme, Digital 1234, for those looking to invest in the KM-1. The new module, which is specifically aligned to inkjet, will look at how companies can build a successful business with B2 UV inkjet.

Packaging, books and commercial print are key target markets that will be covered in-depth in the programme, which assesses the customer’s business to help them identify where new opportunities exist.

“The amount of interest in KM-1 is immense, right across the globe. We hugely value the interest of every company we’re working with and we want to understand their business so we can show them a clear return on their investment, hence why we’ve developed Digital 1234,” said Hinder.

“KM-1 is not a transpromo or transactional press designed to produce invoice statements. This is a high-quality offset transfer to digital device where you’re looking at high-quality books, high-quality marketing collateral and jobs on demand where you’d struggle to make any profit on at the moment but that you’re doing to feed revenue and turnover.

“This is where that shift change is now going to come to reality. No longer will you have to be tied to buying plates purely and simply because you had to do that because of quality. This is a real alternative to offset technology.”