The circa-£30,000 machine was installed in late July at the 250sqm digital plant in Bridgend and has joined Heidelberg Versafire printers and CP Bourg, Stahl and Morgana finishing kit.

The device has been brought in to take the place of an existing Matrix laminator from Vivid Laminating Technologies, which will be retained as back-up.

The B2 Komfi Amiga 52 can laminate sheets ranging from 115-600gsm. It is suitable for processing small and mid-volume jobs.

Pensord operations director Karl Gater said: “We’ve looked at lamination on and off over the years.

“We’ve been using the Matrix since we started up the digital plant but because that’s quite a manual process, we needed to find something that was a little bit more automated but was fit for purpose for the digital plant, and quite robust to be able to take some additional digital work in the future.

“We got a great deal on the machine and I felt it was the best on the market for what we needed it for.”

He added: “The digital operation runs with very few people [five full-time staff] so it helps with efficiency to not have one person tied up hand-feeding a single sheet at a time laminator.

“The new machine is easier to set up, it has improved the quality of the finish and it has also freed up the operator to be doing other things at the same time as having the laminator going.”

Pensord has invested more than £3.3m in highly automated kit over the past few months as part of a future-proofing strategy centred on profitable capacity.

Recent installs include an eight-colour Heidelberg Speedmaster XL 106 with the full suite of ‘Push to Stop’ autonomous printing technology and the firm’s second highly automated Stahlfolder TH 82-P.

Pensord also owns Cambrian Printers, which it acquired last year and the two businesses generate sales of more than £19m between them.