Agfa has inaugurated its large format showroom in Rugby with a barbecue, one of the first industry events to be held since the easing of lockdown restrictions.
The opportunity to chat openly with industry colleagues, from other printers, from Agfa, Kongsberg PCS and Antalis, as well as to see two presses and a cutting table in operation, drew a good flow of business over the two days.
Agfa has squeezed a Tauro 3300 UHS, its flagship large format machine, a Tauro 2500 and Kongsberg C60 cutting table into the unpresupposing space in the Midlands town.
The location however is easily accessible from most of the UK, being close to the motorway network and on the main west coast rail line. This is far easier to get to than Agfa’s head office or the factory in Canada where the presses are made. It replaces the facility that Agfa had previously had at its Leeds plate factory, closed last year.
The Tauro 3300 UHS marks Agfa’s return to high speed inkjet printing, filling a gap it left when retiring the MPress model. “This is very much Agfa going back into high end and high productivity large format printing,” says Bobby Grauf, inkjet sales manager UK and Ireland.
“It keeps the bits about the MPress customers likes, and gets rid of those that they didn’t like.”
The showroom machine is configured with white and primer and light black and light cyan, as well as CMYK supplied in 3-litre containers and fired through Ricoh printheads. This is the bottom of the range machine. Other configurations can be made faster and more resilient. There is enough nozzle redundancy to enable printing without having to stop should a nozzle be blocked. The heads can be flushed automatically, but wiping them clean remains a brief manual task.
The press will start from cold in 15 minutes, with LED UV providing instant power as well as consuming less energy than UV lamp systems.
The smaller machine is aimed at a jobbing environment and lacks some of the productivity focused features of the Tauro 3300 UHS.
The aim is to give customers and prospects an initial view of the technology, ahead of a more detailed examination in Antwerp. “Because we don’t have the complete range here and can do the bespoke exact configuration with all the bells and whistles from prepress to handling,” says Grauf.
This has hampered sales of the printer in the UK to around six sold to date, below the rate in France and Belgium where demonstrations have been possible. The opening of the showroom seeks to fill this gap, and judging by the interest seen at the opening, Agfa’s investment will be justified.
“The event has done what we wanted,” says Grauf. “People have been able to see the machine work and that is stimulating interest in the product range that we have now. And three key people that we wanted to show the Tauro to have told us to come and have a proper conversation with them.”
