The company, which is part of the £23m turnover Print People Group, specialises in high-quality, colour-critical print, using both litho and digital, as well as complementary facilities such as design and e-commerce via sister company Fast Ant.

With four B1-format Speedmasters – including three 12 colours – and a brace of B2 presses, the prepress department at the Leicester-based business is also kept on its toes ensuring the smooth flow of work to the rest of the factory.

The company has long been an advocate of what it calls ‘house proofs’ – imposed, double-sided proofs that can be mocked up into the finished product. However, up until about 18 months ago, producing the double-sided proofs required to create them was a manual affair, which would cause something of a bottleneck in the prepress department.

Technical colour specialist Chris Bolton takes up the story: "At the last Drupa in 2008, we came across the Preproofer when we were looking around the show, and we were intrigued by the configuration of two proofers on top of each other. We thought ‘what’s this?’ We already knew Bodoni Systems, and afterwards it came to light that they were the reseller for it."

The Preproofer does have the potential to seem a bit ‘Heath Robinson’ upon first inspection. Made by Swiss firm Digital Information, it involves harnessing two Epson Stylus inkjet printers together, one on top of another, via a frame. The top printer prints and cuts the sheet, which then ‘falls’ into the second printer along a special paper guide that keeps the sheet in register, ready for printing the reverse.

Bodoni supplies the special double-sided paper for the system, and the media also comes with a larger 15cm core to avoid problems with paper curl when it gets to the end of a roll.

"We investigated it and tested it, and it fulfilled what we required," says Bolton, who also looked at various other potential proofing options, including copier-type small digital presses. "They worked quite well, but there are not too many solutions available in this wider B1 format."

As a result, the Preproofer became the favoured choice. As well as 16pp section impositions, it’s also big enough to be able to produce mock-ups of large items such as document folders. 

 Ongoing usefulness
The company ordered the £9,950 device at the same time as it ordered two new Epson Stylus 9900 printers for contract proofing. The arrival of the new proofers meant that Taylor Bloxham’s existing 9800 and 9880 models could be repurposed for use in the Preproofer, and this ability to give a new life to older printers is seen as one of the key advantages of this system.

Installation was smooth. "The installation went really well," Bolton says. "The Bodoni engineers and all the people there have been very supportive. The architecture is really quite simple, so there’s nothing over-complicated about it, and it seems compatible with most prepress systems."

Bolton says that the firm initially had "a few small issues" with static, but this was sorted out speedily by Bodoni’s engineers: "It was resolved quickly through understanding what the problem was and adding some earthing solutions."

He describes the DI-Plot software that controls the Preproofer as "well thought-out". DI-Plot takes in ROOM (rip once, output many) data and is compatible with a host of workflows, including Agfa Apogee, Kodak Prinergy, and Heidelberg Prinect. Taylor Bloxham has integrated the system with its Kodak Prinergy workflow.

Back-to-back registration accuracy of about 1mm is adequate for the company’s purposes, although the latest version of the Preproofer has improved this to just one tenth of a millimetre, according to Bodoni Systems managing director Ian Reid. "The new version has cameras on the tracking system that guides the paper, which makes it more accurate for front-to-back registration," he says.

In fact, the biggest problem Taylor Bloxham seems to have had with the Preproofer was a surfeit of people wanting to output on it. "We had to sort out a hot folder system for it because numerous preress operators were bombarding it with jobs at the same time. We put a solution in place to make sure everyone knows which jobs are going through, so they can be prioritised accordingly," says Bolton.

 Proof of satisfaction
The house proofs produced on the system are used internally by Taylor Bloxham’s own staff, as well as by customers. "We get customer sign-off on contract proofs and the house proofs, so that we know everything is in the correct position.

"Lots of clients really like having the made-up book in their hands. It’s a good check for them that everything is in the right place. It’s good for our press minders as well – because they can check things quickly and easily – and for the finishing department too," Bolton explains.

Taylor Bloxham typically outputs to the Preproofer at 360dpi resolution, rather than the higher 720dpi that is possible with the set-up.

"We run it at this resolution in order to get the speed benefit, as it only takes six or seven minutes per proof this way," Bolton says. "The text quality is acceptable, and we can always bump up the resolution if we need to. We can also run the Preproofer with reduced ink levels, because it doesn’t need to be accurate for colour – these proofs are about checking the position and the pagination."

The prepress department runs 24/7 and the Preproofer is being used "constantly". It’s proved itself to be robust and reliable. By far and away the major plus point for Taylor Bloxham is its unattended operation, which Bolton says is a "big benefit". "It allows us to do what we need to do more efficiently, and to please our customers. We’d be lost without it now," he reveals.

There are circa 2,000 installations worldwide, but just ten here in the UK, which seems rather low, given the system’s obvious benefits. Bodoni’s Ian Reid aims to change that.

"We only took it over a couple of years ago," he says. "Nobody had been actively selling it into the UK before that. It’s a very neat machine because it just sits there and does its job. For double-sided proofing, it’s absolutely ideal."

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SPECIFICATIONS

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Company profile
Leicester-based Taylor Bloxham is approaching its 75th anniversary. The company specialises in high-quality colour printing, including its own method of high-definition print production designed to achieve stand-out definition and colour clarity. Its press hall is home to a battery of B1 and B2 Heidelberg Speedmasters, including three 12-colour B1 long perfectors, and a six-colour XL 105. Its facilities also span digital printing, as well as a raft of complementary services, such as digital asset management, design and logistics. The firm recently received the BPIF seal of excellence for both health and safety, and human resources.

Why it was bought
The company has an ongoing requirement for the production of double-sided proofs for creating ‘house proofs’ – a mock-up of the finished job for checking that page impositions and content are correct. It had been using a manual system, whereas the Preproofer provides unattended operation because it produces double-sided proofs automatically.

How it has performed
Chris Bolton says the Preproofer has fulfilled the firm’s requirements "100%", by allowing them to process more work, more efficiently. Apart from a small teething issue with static when it was first installed, the only challenge has been setting up a system to cope with the demand for it.