Exeter-based printer William Pollard & Company has installed a Xerox iGen 150 alongside its existing iGen 4 to allow it to print a wider range of formats digitally and to better match brand color across litho and digital. The company, which serves a range of local and national clients via its in-house developed web-to-print system – godesignonline.co.uk, commissioned its new iGen 150 on Monday, completing a £600,000 spend in the past 10 months on new software and print technology.
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Pollards sales director Douglas Myatt said that the company opted for the iGen 150, rather than a second iGen 4, for its “quality, productivity and because it closed the gap on a number of products we couldn’t produce digitally”. These include A4 landscape and 6pp A4 portrait brochures, which the iGen 150 can handle due to its larger maximum sheet size compared to the iGen 4 (364x660mm vs 364x521mm).”We do quite a bit of direct mail and having the larger sheet means we can now do 6pp A4 personalised now – there are quite a few products we would have had to do litho before that we can now do digital,” said Myatt.”Locally we do quite a lot of work with estate agents and they like both the 6pp A4 portrait and 4pp A4 landscape formats; it’s also good for one-piece mailers where you have a roll-fold and then seal it with a glue dot or wrap-round label.”
Myatt added that there was also a quality enhancement with the iGen 150, in terms of being able to print finer text, enhanced tonal prints and a wider color gamut, which has enabled better production of brand colors across different production technologies.”We work with multi-site businesses and charities that are printing a mix of litho and digital work and it’s very important to be able to consistently match their brand colors across all our devices.”The larger sheet size means Pollards will also benefit from about a 25% gain in productivity following the iGen 150 install, which Myatt said would enable the firm to offer faster turnaround of urgent digital work. Other recent investments include a Roland VersaCamm VS-540i that was installed in early February and the addition of a third-party image editing tool (Chili Editor) to Pollards’ godesignonline web-to-print system (which was added last summer).
Myatt said: “We developed the system around 6-7 years ago for stocking and controlling and built it up from there, adding first static templates and then variable a couple of years ago [but] in terms of editing ability we’d probably taken it about as far as it could go, which is why we integrated the Chili Editor last summer.”Because it’s such an easy system to use and it’s linked to our Tharsten MIS which gives really good management data, we find a lot of people tend to want to put everything on there and treat us like a print manager – that’s why we added wide-format, because people wanted pop-ups and display items.”
