Print is an emotional business, perhaps even a vocation for many, and it is often driven by a passion from business owners and managers that have spent their life turning creative vision into reality for their customers.
This view was certainly borne out at the Fujifilm Peak Performance 2022 event, where printers from across the UK and Europe gathered in Brussels to witness the new Jet Press 750s in action and learn about trends shaping our sector’s future. They all shared a desire to sustain their vocation for the long-term and were looking to Fujifilm for support in doing so.
Innovation in Print Media and Marketing spoke to Mark Stephenson, Product Manager, Digital Printing and Press Systems, Fujifilm Europe and asked what he would say to printers in attendance who still harboured anxieties about the durability, quality and support provided for inkjet printing technology.
“Well for the reliability side it’s not a lot of pressure for our service teams, because it just keeps on running,” says Mark, who continues: “If you compare other printing technologies with inkjet and you’ll find lots of moving parts, consumables, lots of things that need replacing on a regular basis and lots of engineers. With inkjet you have fewer moving parts, less consumables and therefore less services inquiries. It is built on an offset chassis, which is designed to go faster than we can drive it at the moment. Of course, we keep making it go faster and the new Jet Press 750s is an example of that sustained evolution with a top speed of 5,400 B2 sheets per hour.
“As far as the print quality goes, I have stopped having that argument now, I just hand over a piece of print and I ask the customers and potential customers to tell me – and I don’t get push back – it’s there, it’s deliverable and we have customers around the world successfully delivery that quality benchmark every day.”
Short runs in, profits out
Speaking to Jet Press customer Henning Rose, managing director of Wegner Print, he has harnessed the technology to produce speciality photo books, catalogues, and high-end speciality printing applications. He explained that the Jet Press sits in a sweet spot for Wegner, as they have the need for ultra-high quality from customers such as artists, galleries, designers, and fashion brands – but as they have high demand for multiple, often versioned, short runs – they would not have been able to develop their successful business model without the Jet Press platform and its performance characteristics.
Mark comments on the opportunities that Wegner has been able to pursue through their investment: “I think because they were purely a digital company, primarily when they bought Jet Press they were a pre-press company that’s converted into a print company – and with no offset in the building at all – they were sending out a lot of work. So, the Jet Press came in and started eating up those smaller volumes. That meant they could send that longer run work out – knowing that they were making some decent profit on the short run. But gradually now as the machine has got quicker and Henning has learnt to maximise his investment, he is now sending very little offset work out – it is all going on the Jet Press.”
