World 1st high-speed digital colour press in Australia

The revolutionary full-colour press, codenamed Sugi, represents a watershed in the development of digital printing. Its ability to produce 980 A4 full-colour, variable-data, double-sided sheets per minute, is likely to make redundant the warehouses of pre-printed statement and invoice shells used for the millions of essential mail transactions taking place every day.

Its arrival in Australia represents a major leap forward in the capacity of service providers, such as HPA, to provide personalised full-colour essential mail items for utilities, finance and telco enterprises. Utilising conventional toner and low-heat flash fusing technology, the DocuColor 980 Colour Continuous Feed is a world first for Fuji Xerox at this speed and sets the benchmark for commercial transactional colour. It prints 980 8.5 x 11 inches or 923 A4 sheets per minute.

"This is the most exciting development in digital printing in years," said Roger Morgan, Fuji Xerox project manager and a long-term evangelist of the technology. "It will change the way we do things, the way we print and will save lots in getting rid of pre-printed offset inventories."

The arrival of the machine was greeted by Neil Brener, chief operating officer, HPA, as a milestone in the development of the company as the premier transaction printer in the region. It already has a Kodak Versamark high-speed inkjet printer and currently many large customer accounts making use of full-colour personalised transactional print communication.

"The DocuColor 980 is the way of the future. It represents the latest technology that enables companies to convert the cost of mailing statements into a revenue opportunity. It allows companies to start talking one-to-one with every one of their customers and cross promoting their products and offers," said Brener.
"It's the next stage in the evolution of CRM."

Although excited about the arrival of the high-speed printer he makes the point that it is not all about the equipment, but rather HPA's ability to innovate with data, colour and creativity, that is the real value.

"HPA has been working in this sector for more than two years. We've developed our graphics capability along with understanding the software to be able to produce very effective communications on behalf of our clients. It's not easy to acquire these skills and HPA is the only company that can offer clients the full spectrum of high-light colour, inkjet and now high-speed full-colour transactional printing."


Nirvana of toner-based digital printing


The ability to move to full colour digital transactional printing has long been the goal of the press manufacturers. It is unique in being the first market segment to identify the need for digital where the technology was not up to scratch. (Since the introduction of digital printing it has usually been the technology dragging an often-reluctant market.) Either the speed was too slow or the quality not good enough for what is, after all, the premiere corporate/customer communication.

Fuji Xerox first showed a beta model of the DocuColor 980 (Sugi) in Japan two years ago, experimenting with flash fusing of the toner to keep heat at a minimum. Since then it has developed it into what is basically two large powerful single-sided PDF Print Engine-enabled printers linked by a turn-bar and feeding into sophisticated finishing equipment. (Although the exact cost of the HPA press is not public the engines and their substantial array of Hunkler paper handling equipment is likely to be in the region of four to five million dollars.)

Fuji Xerox Australia has also installed a second machine at its Epicenter in Sydney where it will commence customer demonstrations and the development of suitable applications. The two sites place Australia well in front of the rest of the world in this high-speed technology. Already Fuji Xerox affiliates from the USA and Europe are flying in teams to work with the installed machine in Sydney.

Pictured left to right: Gurdip Rupra (FXA Enginner), Mike Willis (FXA engineer), Keith Wilkinson (FXA engineer), David Dawes (FXA analyst) , Rog (salesman), Hiroaki Yoshida (FX PSBG hardware development engineer) and Shinichi Yaoi (FX PSBG xerograhic engineer).



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