ESP Colour is continuing to modernise its short run digital book production operation.
The company installed a Tecnau BookReady inline to its Canon iX3200 inkjet press in the spring and has now upgraded its Horizon finishing equipment to include the ability to add endpapers and loose leaf feeding.
This has been joined by investment in a Ricoh C9500 toner press to replace a Kodak Nexfinity and a Ricoh Pro C7200. One is being retired by its manufacturer and the other has come to the end of its lease.
The new press will be producing covers for perfect bound products including short run books and brochures in both portrait and landscape formats. The Pro C9500 can print long sheet jobs, to 1400mm single sides and 880mm duplexed and on sticks to 470gsm. This amounted to a winning combination according to head of digital production and operations at ESP Dave Woloszczynski. “We decided that the Pro C9500 engine stood out amongst its competitors as it produces best in class output for A4 landscape cover printing. This investment exceeded what we achieved previously – not only delivering a competitive click cost and superior print quality, but also the option to print onto card material up to 470gsm with reproduction of solid colours and subtle tints.”
The Tecnau BookReady, installed in April, delivers book blocks that are offset on the delivery table to make it easy to feed into the Horizon binders. Prior to its installation, ESP needed to use a guillotine to trim the sheets.
More recently the Swindon company has added the inline end paper unit and loose leaf feed to the BQ500 PUR perfect binder. According to a post by CEO Simon Smogur on LinkedIn: “It takes our digital book production to the next level – making it even faster, smarter and more efficient.”
