The iPrint Compact being installed at RDSL.
Following its launch at drupa in May, French developer Impika is installing the second of its iPrint Compact inkjet web press models at the French direct marketing services provider RDSL, based near Paris. RDSL prints around 170 million A4 pages and manages 300 million letters a year. The new inkjet press will be used to help its move into full colour personalisation.
Jean Marc Pasturel, sales and marketing director of Impika, said: ‘After a thorough analysis of RDSL’s needs, we have proposed the Compact model of our range of printers, a true concentrate of performances, to offer the best of colour direct marketing to its own customers, Reader’s Digest, Nespresso, l’Occitane, Mercedes, La Banque Postale.’
Impika so far has not sold any of its presses into the UK market, although it exhibited at Ipex 2010 and has an alliance with Xerox which is its agent over here. It describes its iPrint Compact as the ‘Swiss army knife’ of continuous feed digital printers, as it can be specified in a wide range of configurations. It takes a maximum paper width of 510 mm and can be built for two-up duplex or running, in monochrome or full colour, all in a single tower unit that the company claims has the smallest footprint on the market.
Three print modes are available, from 360 x 600 dpi suitable for basic monochrome or colour printing, up to 1200 x 600 dpi for a claimed ‘offset like quality’ as well as a 600 x 600 dpi medium quality that’s suited to a wide range of document print needs.
The press runs at up to 127 metres per minute, with a high speed mode that allows it to accelerate quickly to full speed, equivalent to more than 1700 pages per minute.
High productivity with the ability to print up to 10 million A4 pages per month, and to absorb demand peaks, thanks to its high speed mode (127 m/min), immediately producing over 1700 pages/minute.
Feeding all those pages is a high performance variable data controller that has been specifically developed for the printer, handling formats such as AFP/IPDS and PDF.
Impika has also developed a new second generation of its water-based HD (High Density) ink, which it claims gives ‘exceptional colour rendering’ on low cost paper, without the need for pre-treatment. A shallow penetration into paper fibres allows the ink to be used on lightweight papers.
The company also said that it designed the press for future upgrades and hinted at a third generation ink in the near future.
These were the factors that RDSL said influenced its order. ‘We value Impika;s professionalism, evident at every stage of the project, from file creation and print workflow, through to finishing,’ said Jérémy Léonardi, strategy and development director at RDSL’ ‘We are starting our move to colour with first class support, especially during the work-up phase. The acquisition of an iPrint Compact fits in a global project of investment in document output management. We’ve totally upgraded our production equipment and trained our IT specialists, production and sales teams.’
Contact: www.impika.com
