Digital Printing
Overview
We provide a comprehensive solution for all of your digital requirements. Applications
include books and manuals printed on-demand including highly personalised and versioned
products, short run rapid turnaround as well as short-run focussed marketing literature
and transactional document production.
We print full colour book covers, text books, magazines, personalised books and
marketing materials on each of our two HP Indigo 5000 6-colour print engines.
Short-run and on-demand monochrome books, journals and manuals are produced on our two
Océ 6000 series print engines, whilst we print high pagination loose-leaf manuals and books on our Nipson VaryPress VP400
digital web.
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HP Indigo 5000 6-Colour Printing Systems
Our twin machine installation provides the capacity and capability to not only produce
high volumes very quickly but also provide the resilience required to ensure that
important client deadlines are not missed due to a machine breakdown.
We have selected the HP Indigo as our machine of choice for digital colour production
because it provides the closest digital replication of the litho product. The need
to migrate book and journal text and covers from litho to digital without the end
user perceiving any loss of quality is a critical factor for many of
our publishing clients.
The HP Indigo 5000 6-Colour Press
The HP technology is ideally suited to the manufacture of high quality personalised
print which is normally fed directly from our XMPie variable data system in pre-press.
Our machines can each produce up to 4,000 4-colour A4 pages per hour, giving a
total capacity of 8,000 pages per hour.
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Highly Personalised Children's books
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Océ 6000 monochrome book production systems
The Océ 6000 is, in our view, the best digital book production press
on the market today. The key features of the press include a short paper path, with
both sides being printed simultaneously, along with an image quality that surpasses
all other systems in the book production market. The benefits to you, the client,
include absolute accuracy in front to back alignment, 1200 x 600 dpi image quality
for tints and halftones and a robust, consistent and reliable output to meet critical
deadlines.
Océ 6000 monochrome book production system
Once again we have invested in a second 6000 line to add resource and resilience
to our facilities. These machines are ideally suited to double-sided printing as
required in book and journal production. To facilitate efficient production of single-sided documents such as invoices, renewals, reminders and other transactional pieces
we have an Océ 2110. Our machines can collectively produce up to 520 monochrome
A4 pages per minute or 31,200 pages per hour.
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Wire-o bound educational books and manuals produced on demand
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Nipson VaryPress 400 Digital Web Press
Our Nipson installation provides a highly efficient system for the production of
loose-leaf manuals and books. This reel-fed line is able to run continuously and
therefore generate printed and folded images faster than any sheet-fed system or
indeed virtually any other digital web system on the market.
The Nipson VaryPress 400 Digital Web Press
The specific advantages that the Nipson can deliver at Hobbs include a 467mm printable
image width on a maximum 520mm web width. This allows very efficient production
of many book, journal and technical manual formats that no other digital webs can
match.
The Nipson uses flash fusion to fix the toner to the substrate, thereby avoiding
the excessive heat applied by laser printing systems. The primary advantage of this
is that the paper is not heated to the same high temperatures required by these
systems, which means that paper curl is minimised because moisture is not driven
from the paper. Unlike most other digital web solutions, our Nipson runs standard
litho stock allowing digital and conventional books to be produced on exactly the
same paper.
The Nipson VaryPress installation at Hobbs is a unique configuration specifically
designed to allow it to be used for the manufacture of monochrome books, manuals
and journals on lightweight stock. The system is equally capable of printing on
standard weight stocks.
The VaryPress 400 is a high-speed digital web that can print at speeds of up to
125 metres per minute. This can generate over 1,600 A4 pages per minute or 3,200 A5
pages. This means that in each hour of production we can produce up to 192,000 A5
monochrome pages on this powerful digital press.
Our digital print lines feed into a wide array of finishing options:
Loose-leaf products are trimmed and drilled on one of our five drilling systems
before shrink-wrapping on one of two Shanklin shrink-wrapping lines.
Books and journals are bound on either the Horizon BQ470 adhesive binder using PUR
technologies to produce very strong and flexible bindings, or using hotmelt EVA adhesive
on our Horizon BQ270 binder. Trimming is usually handled by the Horizon HT30 digital
trimming system with back-up from our Wohlenberg and Muller Martini trimming units.
Many of our digital products are dispatched directly to the end users saving time
and warehouse operations for our clients. Speed to market is an essential element
of what we are providing here.
More information about binding technologies, options and services can be found on
our Bindery page.
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Loose Leaf products
Saddle-stitched products
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