Fujifilm is running open days at its Bedford showroom throughout May, inviting printers to road test the Jetpress 720S B2 inkjet press. It will provide the opportunity to get to grips with the innovative machine and to really understand it through running real jobs, according to Fujifilm GS UK managing director Keith Dalton.
The company has three presses in operation in the UK and will be able to run a machine in Bedford before that is installed at a new customer rather than take prospects to the Advanced Print Technical Centre in Brussels to test the press. The 21 days in May will allow printers earlier in the buying cycle to gain experience of the press and run their jobs.
“Printers need to be more forward looking,” says Dalton. “This is a very conservative industry. Many supplier would have an open house or attend an exhibition with canned demonstrations: we are not going to do that. Printers can bring their own, perhaps their most difficult, jobs in to print.”
The aim it to book exclusive morning and afternoon sessions for most days with three more conventionally structured open days for those at the earliest stage of investigating the new technology. “They can bring as many jobs as they like,” says Dalton. “We always say ‘bring your most difficult jobs’.”
Fujifilm hopes to convince printers that they should think seriously about a next investment: whether a ‘more of the same’ machine will have as much impact on a business as a changed approach.
The Jetpress 720s is a four-colour B2 format sheetfed inkjet press. There is no make ready, no cost or time lost in terms of plate making and waiting for sheets to dry. The four-colour inkjet inks deliver a wider gamut than CMYK litho inks and provided the correct paper profiles are used, will recall settings instantly for repeatable consistency. It adds up to a powerful platform for short run printing with an up time in terms of press availability in excess of 90%.
By taking on the short run jobs and those that demand the fastest turnaround, greater capacity is released for the conventional litho presses a user might have. “We can jump from the simplest to the most challenging jobs with no time or paper wasted in makeready,” says Dalton. “Throw the jobs at a press and it will print them. If somebody wants a proof the press will interrupt a job to print just that one sheet and then pick up with no waste.”
Unless prearranged, printers will need to select from one of four papers for the jobs, ranging from silk, coated and uncoated papers. In a standard configuration, the Jetpress 720S can cope with papers from 100gsm to 350gsm. In a packaging set up, it will take from 250 to 600 micron boards. In this instance coating would need to be offline.
To date Fujifilm has three UK customers, Emmerson Press, Kingfisher Press and Greenshires. The first are both small printers realising that they need to do something different to manage in the future. “We want people to come without any pressure,” Dalton says.
The Jetpress 720S is not a standard digital press, he stresses. “It is not a green button machine. You still need someone who knows about paper and how to get paper through the press. The old art of paper handling is still needed.”
Printers are being asked to bring their most challenging jobs to Bedford to test the Fujifilm 720S. They will be able to judge the quality of output and the ease with which the press can deliver this output.
