ASL has taken on the Kyocera TasKalfa 15000C production inkjet press with Will Docherty saying “I believe the TasKalfa will revolutionise the production of short run direct mail and transactional mail”.
The cut sheet inkjet press was introduced last year as the first production level press from one of the key suppliers of piezo print heads. Shortly after Kyocera announced the first UK sale at Document Despatch and then the appointment of Chris Matthews as production print manager of Kyocera Document Solutions in October.
Now ASL is set to become a major sales channel for the press. The broad spectrum supplier is already the largest provider of Kyocera printers into the office market. “We have been aware that Kyocera was coming into the production print market for some time and spent a long time last year at Kyocera’s head office testing it thoroughly. This is a massively important machine.”
The press joins the portfolio of production level equipment that ASL can supply from Canon, Ricoh, Xerox and Konica Minolta. It can supply the KM1 B2 inkjet press and Jetvarnish embellishment presses from this supplier. The company can also supply the Kodak Nexpress. “When we moved up to production print we wanted to be independent of any brand. Instead we want to be able to sit in front of any customer to understand their pain points and provide them with an informed view of what all manufacturers can offer.”
The Kyocera press is a cutsheet two-page inkjet machine that outwardly comes up against the Xerox Baltoro and Canon i300 series machines, but at a much lower cost than either of these machines. It is not positioned to compete with these, having a monthly rate of 1 million pages a month at a quality that is suited to transactional and personalised direct mail.
It can replace the need to hold preprinted sheets as shells, instead enabling personalised print combining a letter and customer specific voucher, says Docherty. “It’s a really good value proposition and attractive total cost of ownership for printers and it gives us an opportunity to differentiate ourselves in a crowded market place. Many of the suppliers have presses that do more of less the same thing and will do what users expect them to do. This is something different.”
There is also the promise of more to come. Kyocera is scratching the surface with the Pro 15000C and its printheads are popular for more demanding applications in label printing in particular. At the end of last year the developer announced the latest iteration of the KJB4 printhead. the EX 1200 with a 1200dpi resolution and a 25% increase in print speed.
