Stafford-based Creative Bee has updated its Mimaki roll-fed printing capacity with a JV100-160 supplied by CMYUK, replacing a pair of older machines from the Japanese manufacturer, providing faster throughput and increasing applications flexibility.
The business, which is the digital wide-format sibling of offset print business Creative Colour-n-Copy, has been using a Mimaki JV33 eco-solvent machine and a CJV33 solvent printer/cutter, but was having to run double-day shifts to keep up with volume demands. Director Anne Grice preferred to stick with the brand she knew and trusted but found there was more to the upgrade than she had expected:
‘It prints in a fraction of the time but there’s no difference in quality, it’s exactly the same but just so much quicker because it’s got the double head. Also, if you’ve got a problem with one, you can just go back to printing with a single head, which is a massive sales feature,’ she commented, adding, ‘We’ve just completed a job that involved printing 12 rolls of vinyl that we then cut into labels for a customer. If we had been doing that on our old printers, this job would have taken several days and nights, not to mention the electricity consumed.
‘The new printer has impacted us immediately saving so much time and money. If we have signage jobs that we can’t print direct to board due to size limitations of a maximum of 8 x 4ft, we can now output to vinyl and mount the print and produce 5 x 10ft signs, which is a huge bonus for us. There are lots of little things that we couldn’t do before but now we can, it makes our lives so much easier.’
The 1620mm media width of the JV100-160 compared to the 1370mm of the older machines also simplifies the production and installation of vinyl wraps amongst other applications. In conjunction with the litho print facility it means the company can cater to most print requirements, from business cards, through to brochures, booklets, folders, signage, banners, vehicle livery, window graphics, pull-up stands and canvas prints, confirms Ms Grice, who also praised CMYUK’s pre-sales, installation and subsequent support service.
