Bonacia is half way through installation of a Canon i300 inkjet press at its factory in Peterborough. This is a first inkjet press for the digital only book printer.
The £350,000 investment will increase capacity and will reduce print costs, the company says. Installation has meant that other machinery needed to be moved to accommodate what will be the company’s largest press.
Until this investment the company has used Kodak Nexpress machines for colour print on demand and call off books, most recently a Nexpress SX3300, with an over sized glosser. The toner machine remains key to the company’s strategy. It remains the choice for full coverage colour, such as photobooks.
The Canon comes into its own where toner coverage drops to 25%, then the lower costs of inkjet kick in. The handbooks, guides, journals and planners that Bonacia prints have previously been split between mono text and colour sections printed on Nexpress. Now the company can print a run of colour more effectively with the inkjet press.
Production manager Carl Whitelock says: “The i300 is our first inkjet add on to our expanding production department. It’s an interesting time for us as currently all our presses are toner based, so we’re looking forward to getting the press up and running and seeing ColorGrip in action.”
This is Canon’s priming fluid that holds the water based ink on the surface of the paper.and accounts for the colour lift and quality of print achieved.
The press was delivered on 6 September with a four-week installation schedule, to be followed by a week of training and installation of the PrismaSync workflow.
While the company looked at other options, including continuous feed inkjet, the relatively low cost of the cutsheet machine, as well as output quality, “made it an affordable way to introduce inkjet into our production facility,” Whitelock says.
“The i300 means we can print the lower toner coverage colour jobs all in one go at better quality, faster and cheaper, which will lead to new customers as we’ll be more competitive on price and lead times with excellent, consistent quality.”
As well as this press and the Nexpress, Bonacia has bought a Muller Martini Vareo binder with Infintrim to form the bulk of a £1.5 million investment since 2015. The next step will be case binding equipment, which will arrive next year and will handle the increasing volume of this style of work.
