Vision Impress is a new digital printing of One Vision Imaging, one of the UK’s largest professional photographic laboratories.

It uses an HP Indigo 5600 six-colour digital press to produce short run digitally printed business stationery, advertising material, calendars photobooks and albums.

For its finishing requirements it chose Ashgate Automation to supply a range of equipment including a Fastbind Elite XT perfect binder, Fastbind Casematic H46Pro casemaker for soft and hardback photobooks and albums, bespoke ring binders and CD and DVD cases, a KAS Paper Systems Crease Matic 150P fully programmable creaser, a Matrix Duo 650 laminator and an Ideal 5221 programmatic guillotine.

‘We have been monitoring digital printing technology for the last four years until we were confident that the quality was on a par with our traditional silver halide process,” said Nik Proctor, sales and marketing manager. ;We now have a press which we are confident will give our customer base of 20,000 photographers a fast turn round, high quality, short run products. At the same time we can also provide them with business cards, letterheads and all the printed literature they require from the same company.’

To complement the short run digital applications from the digital press, Vision Impress required  a range of finishing equipment,’ he added. ‘Ashgate was the only company that  could provide us with  the package we needed’ Whilst they are well known for their Fastbind range of photobook and presentation binders, they can also supply guillotines, creasers and laminators.

‘We’ve enjoyed working with Ashgate. This is a new venture for us and their help has been invaluable in selecting the right equipment for now and the future. Their training and after sales service have been excellent.  As well as being available at the end of the phone to give us advice, we have recently had an on-site refresher course where we learned some useful new information on how achieve maximum benefit from the equipment. Although it is early days, we are getting good feedback from our customers. We are already starting to build up the photobook side with samples so that we have all the marketing material ready for a major push in the next few months.’

Contact: www.visionimpress.com and www.ashgate.co.uk