The press was installed on 1 December at Solway’s Dumfries premises and is expected to be in production by the end of this week.
It replaces an 18-month-old Xerox J75 and remains Solway’s only digital printer. The company said the leased press would cost it around £7,000 per quarter, including click charges.
Solway graphic designer Chris Brown said that he wanted to offer the customer a better quality product and was also excited by the machine’s ability to print on substrates up to 350gsm, 50gsm more than the J75. He believes the printer can eventually be ramped up to take substrates up to 400gsm in weight.
“It’s early days but I think it will improve production and make things faster and give us better colour control. Every time you buy something like this it pushes you on, so in two year’s time there will be an even better system out there,” said Brown.
“You have to keep pushing in this industry, otherwise you fall behind.”
Brown was also impressed by the four-colour Xerox’s 10-bit colour system, which allocates a certain amount of pixels per colour for improved quality.
It prints on maximum SRA3 size at maximum speeds of up to 80ppm and can deliver image quality of 2,400dpi. At its launch in March 2015, along with the Colour 800i and 1000i, it became a “strategic replacement” for the J75 and C75 models.
Solway managing director Amanda Creedon-Bass said she was also excited by the machine’s quality capabilities, saying she hoped the ability to eventually print on 400gsm would make a massive difference to customers looking for turnarounds in a day.
Along with the Xerox, Solway runs four Heidelberg GTOs, two Platens and a large-format Epson machine. It also has finishing equipment, including for foil embossing.
“We are trying to keep up with whatever’s growing, keeping on top of what we are good at and continuing to try to sell, sell, sell,” said Creedon-Bass.
“We do a lot of work for London-based clients but we haven’t managed to hit Edinburgh and Glasgow yet, so we could do with branching into those areas a little bit more. There are not many printers in Britain let alone Scotland that offer letterpress and we do it to quite high standards.”
Last year, 15-staff Solway Print joined forces with central London printer Solways and all printing operations were moved to Dumfries.
The £750,000-turnover outfit has just recruited a new team member for its pre-press department.
