The machine was installed at the Preston-based outfit’s premises last Thursday (13 July) and has already been used for a number of tests and live jobs. List price for the machine, which has been configured with a long feeder to take longer sheets, is around £30,000, although Sprintprint is utilising a hire purchase agreement. Two Konica Minolta bizhub C650s have been retained as backup machines.
Managing director Stuart Smith visited Konica’s demo site in Warrington earlier this year without the intention to buy but was impressed with what came off the press and is now likely to buy a second AccurioPress within a year.
“I went to look at the demo suite and I took some of my board down with me and it ran great,” said Smith.
“I thought when our lease is up we’ll get one of these. Then we were shown the long feeder with six-page A4 and I thought it just figured.
“The colour consistency seems very good, it’s more like true litho print. We are very happy with it, we wanted something to feed thicker board and it does that and its great for a six-page or eight-page landscape brochure.”
The machine is being used for runs of anything up to 3,000 but longer runs may be pulled over from Sprintprint’s two litho presses, a four-colour Shinohara and two-colour Ryobi. The machine has also been configured with an envelope feeder.
“We ran envelopes last week and didn’t have a single jam on it,” added Smith.
“You would think new-to-the-market digital press envelope feeders may not work but it flew through them. They were all short run but they were brilliant.”
The C2060L runs at a maximum speed in black and white mode of 61ppm. It takes paper with long sheet feeder at a maximum size of 330x1,200mm, weighing up to 350gsm and printing at 1,200dpi resolution. It has a 4,250 sheet maximum paper capacity for long press runs without interruption.
Sprintprint, which has sales of £500,000, produces a wide variety of commercial work, including brochures, leaflets and wide-format banners, using a large-format Roland machine. Since a freak accident five years ago involving the detonation of a WW2 grenade in its basement, it has invested more than £100,000 on site improvements and kit.
