Peterborough-based Bonacia has installed a Canon i300 cut-sheet inkjet press to better support increasing volumes of work for businesses and entrepreneurs outside its high quality colour book publishing operations.
The company, which has been a long-standing Kodak digital press user, is keeping its Nexpresses for high quality colour work and for some parts of jobs that will now be split with the Canon inkjet, which will principally be used for lower-coverage work such as handbooks, guides, journals and planners where the Nexpress photo quality isn’t required.
‘The i300 means we can print the lower toner coverage colour jobs all in one go at better quality, faster and cheaper, which will lead to new customers as we’ll be more competitive on price and lead times with excellent, consistent quality,’ managing director Rosie Whitelock told Digital Printer, also noting that the Nexpresses would continue to be used for full colour high coverage work.
‘We looked at various options when we decided to add an inkjet press to our current toner-based set up. We opted for the i300 as the purchase price made it an affordable way to introduce inkjet into our production facility,’ she added.
Carl Whitelock, production manager, commented, ‘The i300 is our first inkjet addition to our expanding production department. It’s an interesting time for us as currently all our presses are toner-based, so we’re looking forward to getting the press up and running, and seeing ColorGrip [Canon’s inkjet primer system] in action.’
The £350,000 Canon inkjet press arrived on 6 September and is currently part-way through the four-week installation and commissioning period, with training and testing plus familiarisation with the Canon PrismaSync software to follow. The acquisition of the press brings Bonacia’s equipment spend since 2015 to around £1.5 million, including a Muller Martini Vareo perfect binder and InfiniTrim combination confirmed at Hunkeler Innovationdays 2019, as well as as a Kodak Nexpress SX3300 with over-size glosser.
