London large and small format digital print specialist, Passion Print, has recently transformed its busy West-end digital print production house, following the installation of two Ricoh digital presses. The two machines, a Ricoh Pro™ C901S and Ricoh Pro™ 5100S, were installed in February 2014, providing the business with a powerful production platform to grow the business and enter new markets in 2014.
Says Robert Grundy, Managing Director, Passion Print: "We recognised late in 2013 we needed to replace our two incumbent Xerox machines with a more high performance and flexible production solution to move our business forward in the new year and enable us to maximise our extensive digital print finishing capabilities.
We went out to the market and undertook an extensive trial process with Ricoh and a selection of the other big names in the industry.
Across the board, the Pro™ C901S, was a clear winner. We were extremely impressed with the machine's overall performance, print quality and potential return on investment, as well as a level of versatility we just didn't see in the other machines. The machine is a real high-end production workhorse and when combined with the Pro™ C5100S and its long sheet size offering, we could see that these machines had the potential to really transform our business and our commercial strategy for the future."
Mr Grundy says Ricoh also arranged for the team at Passion Print to speak to a few of its current customers and says what really stood out from these discussions was how reliable the machines were and how strong the on-going support from the Ricoh team was. Continues Mr Grundy: "In this business you are often only as good as your last job, so the highest levels of reliability and support are absolutely critical. We work with a range of advertising and marketing agencies, media houses, hedge funds and design studios, and they all need the highest quality product, on demand. Our new Ricoh machines will give us the flexibility to serve our current customers even better than we do, and also help us to open doors into new additional markets, where the highest quality and rapid turnaround times are the norm."
The Ricoh Pro™C901S Graphic Arts Edition is an advanced best-in-class digital colour production system that takes print quality and printer reliability to another level in the professional production print environment. Equipped to produce an incredible variety of printed materials, the Pro™C901S provides impressive levels of versatility, scalability and performance. Its flexible workflow, feeding and inline finishing suits any print volume, low or high, while paper path technology enhancements significantly improve productivity, front to back registration and colour accuracy, impressively marrying offset-like quality with the added value of digital.
Along with its bigger brother, the Pro™ C5100S is the first digital production printer to feature Ricoh's enhanced toner transfer technology which delivers high quality print results on heavily textured stock – perfect for direct mail and marketing applications. Wide media compatibility is one of the many key benefits of these models. A new fuser assembly uses information from the media library to optimise the fuser temperature and pressure combination for each substrate increasing compatibility and quality of output. This is ideal for printing challenging applications such as envelopes, where the balance of pressure and heat is critical to maintain a flat and perfectly printed product.
Continues Mr Grundy: "What also really impressed us was that the Ricoh team were completely confident beyond doubt of the quality of output all their machines can produce. It was this, along with very comprehensive and considered service agreements that gave us the real confidence move to Ricoh and invest in its technology."
Says Gareth Parker, Strategic Marketing Manager, Ricoh UK: "Passion Print's investment in Ricoh's technology is a perfect fit for their vision of changing the way they serve their customers and moving into new markets. The confidence in Ricoh's service and support will make sure customer satisfaction is kept to a high level and gives them the freedom to get on with what this company does best, being passionate about print."
