Inkjet & Digital Printing
UKs First HP Indigo 7000 Digital Press Installed at Precision Printing
Saturday 31. May 2008 - HP today announced that Precision Printing has successfully installed the UK's first HP Indigo 7000 Digital Press, at its site in Barking.
Precision Printing has over 40 years’ experience in the commercial printing business delivering innovative and professional print services to a range of businesses from the financial, property and charity sectors.
Earlier this year the company installed the country’s first HP Indigo 7000 Digital Press beta testing the new technology before its official launch at HP’s pre-drupa event in March. Precision is operating its new press alongside the company’s two existing HP Indigo press 5000s.
“Digital printing is about productivity,” says Gary Peeling, managing director, Precision Printing Co Ltd. “For example, we often print A3 size posters for customers. With our new press we can handle six jobs hour, whereas using conventional print, we can only run two. That’s three times the productivity.”
The HP Indigo 7000 Digital Press marks the beginning of a new generation of digital printing technology. Reaching speeds of up to 120 A4 full-colour pages per minute it has the ability to produce over 3.5 million colour pages per month, for high productivity and increased capacity. Precision’s HP Indigo 7000 Digital Press is optimised by the use of a new digital front end (DFE) from HP, the HP Smartstream Production Pro server. This off-press solution takes workflow tasks out of the press-room and into a pre-press environment where they can be efficiently and centrally managed.
The new press has expanded the economic break-even point with offset printing to the level of thousands of copies, viably enabling the smooth and profitable migration of longer run jobs from lithographic to digital production.
“Using the HP Indigo 7000 Digital Press we can cost-effectively produce personalised and variable data print in run lengths up to and beyond 50,000,” said Peeling. “Our most profitable area of production is in multi-page brochures of between 1,000 and 1,500 copies. Combining the speed of the HP SmartStream Production Pro Server and the speed of the HP Indigo 7000 Digital Press we can transfer more jobs, such as these, from litho to digital production.”
“The new press will help us to make further waste reductions as a business, but it will also have benefits for our clients. We are now able to move larger projects to digital production with a make-ready waste of five or six sheets rather than 500 or 600 sheets. This enables us to process jobs at exceptionally fast speeds ensuring that customers get value for money.”