Solopress is bedding in a Ricoh VC80000 continuous feed inkjet press, the first of Ricoh’s flagship machines to be installed at a customer in the UK. It is not the first in the group, however, as Onlineprinters installed a VC80000 at its Scandinavian Print Group plant in Poland last year. That machine focuses on book printing, while the press in Southend will be targeting stitched products, brochures and catalogues. This is because at the same time as installation of the inkjet press, Solopress has installed a Horizon StitchLiner MkV. This takes printed reels, sheets, folds, gathers, stitches and trims, in a single process. It can also feed covers. These would be printed on a Pro C9500, which is also new to the business.
The set up has been installed in Unit 4, the factory that is 400 metres from the main factory along the estate’s one-way system. It has until now been dedicated to finishing, a change that has meant moving 12 machines to accommodate the new press says operations director Jack Clifford.
“The driver behind the investment is to take more brochures to continuous feed, finishing them on the new StitchLiner. This will increase digital production by 80%.”
According to Ricoh it will also reduce the cost per page for Solopress by 20% as well as tackling the bottleneck in brochure production.
The company will be running 4-5 different papers in two different widths to handle jobs which need a different grain direction. The StitchLiner can act as a gathering machine for perfect binding if required.
The advantage of the VC80000 comes with its ability to run coated papers thanks to ink formulation and its ‘firefly’ drying system, making a confident transition from offset to, inkjet possible.
It is not the first inkjet press at Solopress. In 2020 the company installed an HP T250 which has been used for cut, stack and pack work with two Hunkeler lines to process printed reels. That development enabled an on time turnaround of simple jobs, the new machines takes this into more complex products.
“For our customers this will be a big change, a huge improvement in service and massive for guaranteeing on time delivery,” says Clifford.
The project has taken a couple of years, with HP’s PageWide A2200 and Canon’s ProStream also under consideration.
While the package of machines, service and training that Ricoh put together swayed the head, Clifford says he liked the punchy colour that the high ink coverage the Ricoh delivers “and for our type of customers, that’s perfect”.
Staff, with experience on the T250, have been to Ricoh’s customer experiences centre in Telford for training ahead of delivery of the press at the end of January cutting the familiarisation process on the new machine.
The press is capable of 150m/min and with a resolution up to 1200dpi.
