(L-R) Murray Lock, Joint managing director, M Partners Wide, Ros King and Quentin Harwood King, Harwood King Fine Art Studio
Harwood King Fine Art Studio, fine art screen printers based in Newhaven, has replaced its primary large format printing devices with the Canon iPF 8400 and Canon iPF 815.
The new additions to the Harwood King production line-up provide, respectively, high quality print and film output. The iPF 8400 is a 12 colour, 44-inch wide printing device, ideal for the company’s fine art print production and proofing. The iPF 815 is a 5-colour 44-inch device focused on film production for the subsequent creation of silkscreen originals.
The printers were purchased from and installed by Canon reseller M Partners Wide, the large format equipment distributor based in Surrey, a division of M Partners Limited.
Quentin Harwood King, owner and managing director, said, ‘Our previous device had been a good servant for many years, but it was showing signs of age. We knew that we needed to invest, and whilst Epson is the ‘go to’ supplier in the market place, I wanted to review other products as well. Canon, to us, was a revelation. They certainly appeared to be ahead of the game. The twelve colour system is a huge boost for us especially in the red area of the spectrum. Colour, for fine art work, is so critical. The colour gamut and the stability of the system were both immediate advantages for us.
‘We also create films for stencil creation for screen printing. Our previous large format machine offered little stability for the media – we would often spend huge amounts of time manually adjusting distortion in the films. Canon’s iPF 815 uses motors to drive the material in and to rewind the film. This provides a far more stable and reliable platform for our film creation. It has already saved us a huge amount of work; a saving that has a double benefit as our operators can be producing chargeable work instead of fiddling with bits of film at our expense!’
Mr Harwood King was also hugely impressed by the machine-to-machine colour accuracy offered by Canon. ‘Canon proved to us the stability of their system from machine-to-machine, which means that we could install a second machine at another office, download our files, and it would print exactly the same as the first machine. That really gives food for thought.’
