The refit, coming in February at the end of a five-year contract with Ricoh, has seen the university replace its older machines with Konica Minolta's AccurioPress C12000 and C7100 colour toner presses and two AccurioPress 6136 black and white toner presses.

UoL has also taken on a number of machines from Duplo to help it bring its finishing work in-house, including an iSaddle 5.0 saddle-stitcher, the UK’s first DC-648 multi-finisher, and a PFi Blade B2 digital cutting table.

Switching out the old presses and adding in the finishing kit was no simple operation, according to Oliver Renshaw, business and systems manager for print and mail service at UoL.

He told Printweek: “We turned most of the old machines off on the Friday, and started installing the new ones on the Monday. We never shut down production, so it was chaos.”

The university’s print operation is based beneath a building housing 25 lecture theatres.

“It’s a challenging environment to do an install, and we had to significantly rearrange it — but the Konica engineers were great, the Duplo engineers too. Everyone worked around each other.”

The university had been looking to integrate its wider printer and copier fleet into a single body, so the tender for the new machines was sent out as a joint venture with UoL’s IT department.

Given the purchase of the Duplo kit on top of the wider tender, Renshaw said, the university is not likely to make any more big purchases in the near future.

He quipped: “No, I’m skint now! It was a significant investment, probably the biggest we’ve ever made.”