London fast turnround digital printing specialist 1st Byte has paid a deposit for one of the UK’s first Landa digital presses. While it’s waiting it’s bought an HP Indigo 7600 to get into longer runs. Simon Eccles paid a visit.

When Digital Printer asked 1st Byte’s managing director Lawrence Dalton what he’d hope to see at Ipex a couple of years ago, he joked ‘I’d like to see the B2 Indigo I ordered from Benny Landa at drupa in 2000!’

Two years on, his wish came true, as HP announced and showed a B2 press, the Indigo 10000. So did Mr Dalton renew the order?

No, but he did put a deposit down for a B2 press with Benny Landa. This time round it was the forthcoming range of Digital Nanographic presses from Landa that attracted Mr Dalton’s attention, even though he doesn’t expect to take delivery of anything for at least a couple of years and probably more like four. ‘We’ve got history with Benny,’ he points out.

HP wasn’t left out of the picture though: 1st Byte placed an order for the latest, fastest sheetfed SRA3 model, the Indigo 7600. This will arrive this summer to replace the oldest of the three 5000 presses that are currently running at 1st Byte’s premises in the Clerkenwell area of London.

1st Byte was set up in 1996 as a fast turnround digital print specialist, one of the first to offer same-day or next-day turnround of high quality full colour work. It undertakes a wide range of work, a lot of which is for corporate, agency or financial clients as well as trade work.

Admin is handled by a Tharstern MIS which also drives dashboard production status displays on flat screens dotted around the building. The company now offers regular clients a web to print service called Press4print, resulting from its purchase of a developer called Raging Thunder. ‘This has its own fulfilment and despatch team,’ says Mr Dalton. ‘We can offer overnight printing and next day despatch. It’s mostly low margin, high volume work like business cards but it brings in up to 25% of our turnover. It’s well automated and problem free.’

The company has been an Indigo user from the start, installing an Indigo ePrint 1000 press and supplementing this with two, then three of the second generation TurboStream models. These were replaced by next generation UIltraStreams in 2000, then in turn by three 5000 presses in the following years.

All Indigo sheetfed presses to date have been SRA3 format (they still are, because the B2 10000 model isn’t commercially shipping yet). 1st Byte decided long ago that a larger format would be useful for some types of job, as well as giving greater productivity for longer runs. So when Indigo showed a prototype B2 press called XP2 at drupa 2000, Mr Dalton put his order in. ‘Benny persuaded me that we’d need a backup, so I actually ordered two!’ he says.

Xeikon stopgap

However the XP2 prototype was never seen in public again and the project was dropped before HP acquired Indigo in 2001. Instead 1st Byte bought the UK’s first Xeikon 5000 web fed press in 2004, to handle larger format jobs. Installing that in the tall narrow triangular building was a challenge by itself: as it could only fit on the third floor it had to be dismantled and taken up piece by piece in a cargo lift that was installed for the purpose. It’s still there today, running larger formats including panoramas.

The all-new HP Indigo 10000 B2 press launched at drupa 2012 is an entirely new design,with little in common with the XP2. As visitors to drupa will recall, it’s huge: much wider than the SRA3 models, and weighing a couple of tonnes. Mr Dalton says that its large size and weight wouldn’t fit in the tight confines of 1st Byte’s two-unit factory. The Landa design is much more compact and weighs less.

However, he doesn’t anticipate delivery of his Landa press for a couple of years at least. In fact he said that the actual delivered press may not even be made by Landa itself, but could be one of the three licensees announced at drupa: Heidelberg, Komori or manroland sheetfed. The deposit with Landa, reportedly for 10,000 Euros, puts 1st Byte on the list for one of the early presses, whatever the source, he explained.

Landa showed several Nanographic presses at drupa in a variety of sheet and web fed configurations and formats, including the B1 format S10. Some were operating, others not. It described them very much as prototypes and admitted that there is a lot more development work needed to get performance and quality up to the desired levels.

‘Landa had to show working machines at drupa, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they don’t decide to concentrate on manufacturing the NanoInk and leave press making to the licensees,’ Mr Dalton said. ‘The real technology is in the ink, and Benny Landa has always been good at that.’

It’s likely that 1st Byte would choose a B2 format press, he said, but might even go for a B3 model if that suits the company requirements nearer the decision time. He’s most interested in its potential to bring costs down, so digital competes with offset for longer runs.

‘We looked at the Screen Truepress JetSX B2 sheetfed press as well,’ he says. ‘It’s slow, but the quality is very good. We also looked at the Fuji Jet Press 720 – the quality is even better but it’s single sided and any digital printer would want duplex. The Screen press is good but the click rates they quoted were twice that of Indigo.

Planning for the long run

‘Waiting for Landa gives us two years to build up the clients for longer runs,’ he said. ‘The HP Indigo 7600 will allow us to go for somewhat longer runs in the meantime, as its click rates are more favourable than for the 5000.’ The 7600 will also have the white ink option, allowing 1st Byte to expand its offerings by printing on plastic or dark coloured and metallised papers. Another benefit of the 7600 is its slightly larger maximum sheet size. ‘We do quite a lot of tabbed pages for conference work. The 5000 can only do this one-up, but the 7600 will do two-up, which will make quite a difference in cost and time,’ Mr Dalton points out.

‘We also quite like the new raised ink feature and the effect is quite good, but it will be a matter of trials to see if it’s what the clients want,’ he said. Announced at drupa, this new ability gives a raised effect similar to thermography by building up multiple layers of ink. Mr Dalton says that he’s less convinced by the true embossing effect that’s possible with the new press by building up raised ink on a special cylinder liner sheet and using that as a mould for the sheets.

According to Mr Dalton, ‘Benny Landa is aiming to reinvent digital print in three areas: speed, quality and consumables cost. If he succeeds in just two, he’s got a winner. If there’s only one then it’ll be tougher, but if he can keep the costs down then even without high speed and high quality it’ll be success. If it’s cheap to run but without high quality we wouldn’t be interested, but if the quality is significantly better than other digital presses we’ll want to have it anyway.’ 

The finishing collection

Virtually from the day it was set up, the fledgling company quickly found that sending print out for trade finishing created a bottleneck in its fast turnround service, so it acquired its own kit, building up an eclectic collection that today appears to fill every spare corner in the building. Originally it offered a separate service called 1st to Finish, though everything is now part of the 1st Byte offerings.

It can handle virtually any type of finishing from the mundane to the esoteric. A recent presentation job it was able to both print and finish was a box-book with a thin LCD display built into one page, complete with battery, which starts
playing as soon as that page is opened.

Walking around the 1st Byte building there seems to be at least one of every conceivable small finishing machine and often two or three variations: for instance there’s a top quality Autobond 52 cm laminator in one room, close by what Mr Dalton calls ‘a cheap small Chinese laminator we got for £5000. It may only last a couple of years but at that price it doesn’t matter!’

Its latest installation, a New Bind Pioneer PUR gluer, is the first in the UK. It features an end sheet lifting device that allows end sheets to be placed in the clamp with the book block. It was supplied by the UK distributor Encore Machinery.

A Watkiss SpineMaster has also been recently installed to achieve flat stacking for high quality books and brochures. ‘An example is a recent job we produced, which was initially refused because the finish wasn’t acceptable,’ says Mr Dalton. ‘One of our neighbouring companies had a SpineMaster, so we asked them to put the job through it. The client was delighted with the result. We were delighted too – it saved us a 2000 run print job, and it kept us a valued client. So we bought our own.’ A significant proportion of 1st Byte’s production is sent abroad, so an added benefit of the SpineMaster is that the finished booklets pack neatly and take up much less space.

Contact: www.1stbyte.co.uk