How we do it
I must confess
I love my press
For when I print
I know no stint
Of joy!
Edwin Roffe 1861
A real printer will be able to wax lyrical about his beloved machinery, most especially his printing machines. We’re real printers alright but will try to be concise...
Four colour printing
Heidelberg Quickmaster DI 46-4 digital press
Advanced stuff and our newest acquisition. It runs waterless for environmental friendliness, etches plates off rolls loaded into each printing unit and goes straight into perfect registration. We bought it to do longer print runs, that’s from about 500 impressions up to 20,000. The number of copies of your job depends on how many we can get out of an SRA3 sheet.
The Highwater Torrent DI RIP is new, it’s the software which translates computer files into the information the press can understand and was bought to handle all the latest PDF formats.
*Technical flash
SRA3 is the sheet size we use on all four machines. It is 450x320mm, which is two A4 pages with room for bleeds and grip edges, that sort of stuff.
Xerox 2045 digital press
We got this cheap. It’s funny how difficult that is to say when cheap means £70,000. It’s mustard, though. Its consistency is pulverising. It doesn’t matter whether you’re printing one sheet or 500, they’re all exactly the same - wonderful. It’s what allows us to produce very short runs of beautiful quality colour printing. It uses toner (in vast quantities) but it’s special and gives superb definition.
*A note about paper
None of our machines are fond of lightweight paper, 65 to 80gsm. They’ll run them but everyone is grumbling, clients included. Spending a little extra on heavier weight paper pays off handsomely because we can run it faster which reduces the cost of machine time to you.
Other presses
Heidelberg Quickmaster 46-2 colour
Heidelberg Quickmaster 46-1 colour
These are SRA3 workhorses, fast and consistent. They are trustworthy and have proved to be brilliant presses.
Front End
*Technical flash
Unimaginative but this is how the industry describes the computer wizardry that precedes actual printing. Interestingly, the bit after printing is called ‘finishing’ rather than ‘back end!’
Macs, lovely Macs!
Brilliant, reliable, flexible, long-lasting. We’ve a G4 that’s nearly seven years old. It’s not as fast as the new machines but it never goes wrong so we can’t possibly justify replacing it. It’s not slow enough! The G5 suffers no such indignity, being downright quick. All run OS 10.4 which is rock solid and a dream to use.
Microtek scanner
This was expensive but worth every penny for its quality.
Software
Quark 7.31, Adobe CS2 suite, squadrons of fonts, pretty well everything we need to look after you. Microsoft documents supplied to us need to be accompanied by hard copy. Publisher can’t be accepted because of its resistance to being printed out or sent to a RIP. PDF files created to high resolution with fonts embedded usually work well but there is some skittish software out there which purports to create print-ready PDFs but doesn’t. A general rule is: you only ever get what you pay for.
Finishing
Machine by machine could seem dull so here’s a list of capabilities instead:
Trimming
Folding
Creasing
Scoring
Perforating
Round-cornering
Wire-O binding
Booklet-making
Drilling
Litho varnishing
Encapsulating
If you need anything else then we’ll know a man who can.
