Inkjet & Digital Printing

Creative Norwegian print company Print House AS adds the Jet Press 720 to its portfolio

Friday 05. July 2013 - Fujifilm Europe today announces that Print House AS, a highly creative print company based in Oslo, Norway, has invested in the company's ground-breaking B2 digital inkjet press, the Jet Press 720. The installation, which was completed in early June, complements a range of existing offset and digital presses and associated finishing equipment, all focussed on delivering on the company's promise of producing creative, added value print of the highest quality.

Stian Mørk, company director explains: “We took our time making the decision to invest in Fujifilm’s Jet Press 720, but ultimately our customers were so impressed by the quality of print the Jet Press can produce that the decision was an obvious one. We call it ‘high definition’ print and it fits with our ethos of producing creative print of the absolute highest quality for some of the most discerning customers in Europe.”
Print House AS was formed 42 years ago in 1971 by Stian’s father, Odd Mørk who started with a 1-colour Heidelberg offset machine which is still used today. The company began by producing a wide variety of print, including posters, business cards and envelopes, and grew thanks to the efficiency with which Odd Mørk ran the business. The single colour machine was driven hard, often with 28 plate shifts in a single day, and was eventually complemented by investments in both 2-colour GTO and then 4-colour Heidelberg Speedmaster presses.
A separate company which Stian and his brother Patrick had formed eventually combined with their father’s as they wrestled with the challenge of embracing digital technologies in the early 2000s. The end result was an investment in an Indigo 5000 in 2006, together with some additional finishing equipment. This coincided with a move to their current premises as Print House AS continued to grow, and was followed by further investments in an Indigo 7000 in 2009, an Esko i-XE10 cutting table in 2009 and a Scodix S75 digital enhancement press in 2010. Today the company employs 16 people and last year had a turnover of nearly four Million Euros.
Stian continues, “These investments allowed us to produce a much wider variety of bespoke, high quality, short run print which helped us expand even further. As 50% of our business comes from incredibly talented and demanding creative design agencies, we were constantly pushing the boundaries of what you can achieve with the latest digital print and finishing technologies in order to bring their ideas to life. These relationships have allowed us to produce some astounding print, but inevitably, we became aware we needed to look for a press with a larger format size.”
The company’s first investigation into B2 digital print solutions began at drupa 2012. Steven Widlic, project leader, takes up the story, “Following a visit to the Fujifilm stand, we asked the company to print some incredibly demanding jobs on the Jet Press 720, things we knew would be really tough to print digitally. When we received the printed results back, we showed them to our customers and they couldn’t believe they were printed digitally. Without a doubt, the Jet Press 720 produces the best print we have ever seen, better than offset, which is why we are using the phrase ‘high definition print’. Despite the fact that the machine is only single sided, and most of our jobs are double sided, the quality of output was the deciding factor.
The higher speed and larger format size of the press mean we can now print in-house some of the work we were outsourcing, but more importantly it will allow us to offer an even wider range of ultra-high quality, bespoke solutions for our customers. And, as an additional service, we can offer our customers a real proof printed on the actual stock for a print run of 10 or 100. For short run print, it’s a much more compelling offering than offset.”
So what applications is Print House AS offering on its array of digital machines? Steven Widlic explains, “We print a huge variety of different applications including bespoke event invitations, highly targeted direct mail, real estate property brochures, posters, envelopes and business cards to name but a few. The property brochures, for example, are for high value properties and are no longer really brochures but 100 page perfect bound books with a print run of 20 or 50. There is no option but to print these digitally, and the Jet Press 720 will allow us to be much more flexible in what we can offer our customers.”
Although Odd Mørk retired during the transition to digital printing, the values of efficiency and high quality which proved successful in the early days of the company are still evident today. Stian Mørk concludes: “This is the biggest investment we have made but we are confident it is the right one for our business, as the Jet Press 720 is a perfect fit for our creative, quality focussed and efficient operation. Our experience of dealing with Fujifilm has also more than surpassed our expectations and has been hugely helpful in managing this latest evolution in our business. We’re genuinely excited about what the Jet Press 720 brings us and look forward to putting it through its paces in the coming months.”