• Ian Smith: Advance Press general manager
    Ian Smith: Advance Press general manager
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One of Western Australia’s oldest operating printers, Advance Press works with clients as prestigious as the Royal Automobile Club of WA, the City of Perth, and the Australian Electoral Commission. To boost its digital capacity, the company recently installed an HP Indigo 7800 Digital Press from Currie Group, which has proven to be a production powerhouse.

The newly installed HP Indigo 7800 sits alongside Advance’s older Indigo 5000 press in its plant at Bassendean, a few minutes’ walk from Ashfield railway station. Ian Smith, general manager of Advance Press, explains how replacing the company’s Indigo 5500 with the new press has upped its output in a big way. “There are some months when we get two million clicks on it. It’s a real production machine,” he says. “The improvement on the 5500 that it replaced is enormous in the quality of work it does, and the speed and ease with which it produces that work. We’re very happy with the device – whatever work we throw at it, it produces.”

The addition of the HP Indigo 7800 to Advance’s stable has reduced downtime and added capabilities such as raised varnish and white ink printing. “Where before we weren’t able to do that work, we now can do it in-house, and we’ve had quite a bit of interest. It’s helped us expand our capability for specialty digital printing,” Smith says.

Advance Press has been a Currie Group customer for about 20 years, and Adrian Dixon, WA state manager at Currie Group, says the trade-in of Advance’s 5500 has opened new doors for the printer. “They’ve been quite active and the relationship’s been very strong. The HP Indigo 7800 has been installed for about a year now, and Advance Press has been very forward in opening new markets. They’ve printed with some speciality inks including UV invisible red and fluoro pink, and produced some exceptional special effects on the 7800 as well. All in all, it’s been a great workhorse for them,” Dixon says.

Advance’s new machine hit ten million clicks in the first six months – and it’s probably close to 20 now, says Dixon. “It has been a very active press, but that’s what the 7800 is designed and built for. It likes to be kept busy. What we’re seeing now is genuine offset transfer: as runs get shorter on traditional offset presses, the HP Indigo 7800 can take them away from offset and run them digitally quite comfortably.”

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