Millions of pages saved from going offshore at SOS

Millions of printed pages per month have been saved from going offshore due to the local adoption of a high-volume Kodak inkjet press.

SOS Print and Media’s retention of a high-volume printing account worth over five million impressions a month that was in danger of being lost to an overseas printer has been attributed to the performance of the company’s Kodak Prosper 1000 inkjet press, which it purchased this time last year.

SOS Print and Media’s director, Michael Schulz, says that his company has been able to push up to 40 million impressions through the Kodak press each month, and this high-volume capacity and inkjet flexibility was key to saving the large account from going offshore, a feat unable to be met by offset and toner machines.

“Offset and toner-based technologies were unable to compete,” says Schulz(pictured), “but the Kodak Prosper 1000 press proved to be the ideal solution.”

Schulz says the company is currently running the machine at around 200 metres a minute to satisfy demand. In fact, so happy has SOS been with the Prosper 1000's performance that, over the past year, it has migrated a growing percentage of offset work to the inkjet platform.

“This is proving very successful for us and our clients are impressed with the results,” says Schulz. “We can see that the added productivity will allow us to get into some markets that before wouldn’t have been acceptable, in the short to medium-sized runs.”

Schulz is not the only one who has benefited from the Kodak machine’s varied print run potential at the smaller end of the market. The trend to smaller print volumes in the international book publishing industry was on everybody’s lips at this year’s InterQuest Digital Book Printing Forum during Frankfurt’s annual Book Fair.

Those in the publishing industry are acutely aware of the necessity of short-run digital printing capabilities in the survival of the burgeoning e-book phenomenon, and presses like the Prosper 1000 are meeting the new needs arising from the market trends.

Kodak’s marketing director for the company’s European digital printing operations, Erwin Busselot, said at the forum that the “Prosper [1000] press customers now produce between 8,000 and 10,000 books per shift. The ability to efficiently produce short runs is what will keep printed books competitive in the e-book era.”