Delivered this week, the 10-colour printer will replace one of the firm's three HP Latex machines.

The investment brings in white and metallic inks as well as red and orange spot colours that will allow Smith, which is the trade print wing of the William Smith Group (WSG) in Barnard Castle, County Durham, to match more closely the brand-specific demands of end-users.

WSG head of marketing Chris Bradley said: “There are a few things we have not been quite able to reach in terms of the required colour gamut for certain jobs, but this new SureColor has the inks we need to get to those specific colours.

“I think we were very much aware of the good feedback out there in the market around the SureColor. We went to the Epson stand at Fespa for a chat and it started from there.

“This helps to enhance our offering to the trade, which deals in overflow work or works with people who have not invested the equipment themselves. Our projects go wherever graphics are required and this will help our digital offering greatly.”

The 1.62m-wide SC-S80600 features dual PrecisionCore TFP printheads and runs UltraChrome GS3 inks: CMYK, light cyan, light magenta, light black, red, and orange, while it can also be configured to use white or metallic silver. It prints at speeds up to 95.1sqm/hr in single-pass banner mode and up to 12.5sqm/hr in eight-pass film mode.

Smith Sign & Display is moving forward now into the interiors marketplace, which has increasingly gained weight in the large-format sector as exemplified at this year’s Fespa expo in Munich. Bradley said the firm was “spending a lot of resources” in this area.

With circa 40 staff in the trade print branch, the full William Smith Group employs 102 people and turns over £17.5m.