London City Print has invested in a Ricoh Pro C5100S digital colour cut sheet press to help it keep up with an expanding customer base and transform its print production capabilities.
The company made the investment to provide it with a solid production platform to further grow its business over the next 12 months.
Tony Matthews, managing director, said, ‘We had a record year in 2013, and decided towards the end of the year that we needed to invest in a high-level digital print machine that would give us the confidence and the right technology in place to build on that in 2014. Our new Ricoh Pro C5100S was installed at the end of 2013 and we have already been extremely impressed with its performance and its capabilities. In our marketplace, reliability and speed is everything. If you can’t rely on your machine, you just can’t complete. The Ricoh machine is giving us all this and more.’
The company provides a full range of print services from graphic design to cut-sheet and large format digital printing, laminating and binding in-house. With a Print-for-Pay shop front and a large retained corporate account base, the company regularly serves many legal, financial and marketing brands in the country.
Mr Matthews added, ‘We invested in the Pro C5100S on the back of a recommendation from our Ricoh account manager. We trust him implicitly as he has always taken the time to really understand our business and advise us on the best machines for our business at that time. This is critically important to us as the relationship has to be about more than just the technology. You have to have a partner that can see what the technology means for your business. For us, a digital press is the anchor of the business, so we need to be working with a manufacturer who wants to really understand us, what we need now and also where we are going strategically and commercially over the medium term. The Ricoh press is a high performance machine, but is only part of the picture. It’s the service and support that completes this.’
According to Mr Matthews, the quality of the finished product on the new Pro C5100S is outstanding with solid blacks and a smooth, sheen-like finish, something he says you would traditionally expect from a litho press. He continued, ‘The integrity of the final product is already starting to open up new markets for us – especially at the high quality, high-value end of the market. We have recently completed a prestigious bespoke book publishing job for a client on the new Pro C5100S and both we and the client thought the results were amazing. I know that client will come back for more because we delivered on every front.’
The Pro C5100S digital colour cut sheet production system is ideally suited to those digital printers, copy shops and in-plants requiring a high performance digital technology with a small footprint for the on-demand production of high quality marketing materials, collateral, direct mailings and reports.
Wide media compatibility is one of the many key benefits of this model. A new fuser assembly uses information from the media library to optimise the fuser temperature and pressure combination for each substrate increasing compatibility and quality of output. This is ideal for printing challenging applications such as envelopes, where the balance of pressure and heat is critical to maintain a flat and perfectly printed product.
Gareth Parker, strategic marketing manager, Ricoh UK, said, ‘People are now starting to see and believe that Ricoh’s digital presses are making a real impact in the marketplace. What is hugely encouraging is that those same people are also seeing what real technology-led change is about with digital presses and the Ricoh portfolio.’
