LFP - Large-Format-Printing

Screen Truepress Jet W3200UV HS drives 30% growth at ESAG

Friday 14. August 2015 - Just six months after installing a new Screen Truepress Jet W3200UV HS, Portuguese printer ESAG reports a 30% rise in business. The company is winning new clients, regaining former clients and has started exporting.

“We have to thank the new Truepress for a great start to the year,” says director Alexandre Soares, who runs the family-owned company alongside his sister Margarida. “The machine’s combination of superb quality, high productivity and 100% reliability is exactly what we were looking for.”

ESAG, founded over 30 years ago, has always been owned by the Soares family and has a history that reflects the wider printing industry. The company started out as a trade prepress house, equipped with a Screen SG-737 scanner and supplying film and plates to local offset printers. Recognising that prospects were limited if they focussed on prepress alone, ESAG was an early adopter of digital printing, initially with sheet-fed presses before investing in its first wide-format inkjet press – a Screen Truepress Jet 2500UV.

“The Truepress Jet 2500UV was a major step forward for us,” says Alexandre Soares. “We could offer clients really high quality print on a wide range of media, thanks to the press’s ability to print both roll-to-roll and on rigid stocks.” He adds, however, that the success of the wide-format business brought its own problems. “Basically, demand got so great that we were struggling to meet it — we needed a faster machine for longer runs. Without one, we sometimes lost clients to competitors, even though they couldn’t match the Truepress’s quality.”

So the search began for a high-productivity, high-quality addition to the ESAG line-up — and began with Screen. “Our first call was naturally to Screen,” says Alexandre. “If they had a machine that met our needs we wouldn’t look any further. The answer we got was perfect — a new larger-format Truepress was on its way.”

That printer turned out to be the Truepress Jet W3200UV HS, launched at Fespa 2014 with an output speed of 150sqm/hr on rigid and flexible media up to 3.2 x 1.6m in size and up to a maximum 50mm thickness. “As soon as we saw the specifications and samples of the output we knew we’d found the right machine,” says Alexandre.

The Truepress Jet W3200UV HS was installed in January and was running two shifts within weeks. “The machine has met all our expectations, and more. We’re getting fantastic quality, and it’s been totally reliable — no downtime at all, despite running flat out most of the time. Not only have we won new business, we’ve also won back some of the clients who went elsewhere. And we’ve found an export opportunity that looks as if it could turn into something really good.”

The Screen Truepress Jet W3200UV HS is designed to print a wide range of commercial graphic work — short-run, high-impact sign and display work, including exhibition graphics and retail signage, posters, product decoration, architectural signage, backlit displays.

The press’s design incorporates a host of features that increase productivity and quality. The newly developed printhead modules and Truepress UV inks combine to produce sellable, top-quality graphics at high speed. Linear drives provide exceptionally smooth, controlled and accurate motion of the print carriage, while retractable lay pins provide fast substrate positioning to ensure accurate, repeatable registration, especially on double-sided printing. The multilayer function enables perfect inline registration of up to eight independent image layers for sophisticated front/back overprinting of quality backlit and variable day/night graphics.