Twenty 10 Digital Upgrades to New Ricoh Pro C7500
Managing director Paul Riley with the new Ricoh
Twenty 10 Digital has upgraded its kit with the installation of a new Ricoh Pro C7500, boosting productivity and image quality.
Installed in May, the model replaced an ageing Ricoh Pro C7100 which had “done us proud” since its install in 2017, said Paul Riley, managing director at the Northampton-based printer.
Riley said, “reliability, great service and all-round consistency was key” and the new machine "is a step up in productivity and image resolution.”
“This one is going to mean we can get jobs out quicker,” he added.
“It was about time” for an upgrade, explained the business’s production manager Paddy O’Donoghue.
O’Donoghue said: “We ran the Ricoh 7100 alongside an HP Indigo 5600, and over the last 12 months we’ve migrated all of our work onto the Ricoh. So it was time to invest and make sure we had the best machine to take the company forward.”
As a previous customer of Ricoh, the team were looking to purchase from the supplier again and although they considered its C9500 model, the C7500’s fifth bonus colour offering influenced their final choice.
Other suppliers contacted the printer, but the team felt comfortable with Paul Stead from service suppler ASL, which made for “an easy decision”, Riley said.
O’Donoghue, who operates the presses and had previous experience having run the Ricoh C7100, said training with Ricoh took a full day and was “really informative, showing all the new key points to the machine”.
“It’s a more productive machine,” O’Donoghue told Printweek. “With the added bonus of a fifth colour which means the new 7500 makes it even easier to swap colours in and out of the press and in doing overlays and underlays, which gives a lot more added value to the print.”
He went on: “It’s given us new capacity to take on new work, we can get more jobs out in a day and offer customers extra embellishments to print so it really does give us a competitive edge.”
Working with graphic design companies, the business hopes its extra capabilities will help expand their creative offering, with the team choosing neon pink, white and clear in the new printer’s colour range.
It also means the business no longer needs to send out jobs to get spot UV’d and can do them in-house.
Riley added it was also about cost effectiveness, productivity and allowing the business to get jobs out quicker. He said that its ease of use means the business is looking to hire an apprentice after O’Donoghue leaves in September.
Among the jobs the machine is used for include producing marketing brochures, letterheads and NTR sheets for customers.
Other kit at the Twenty 10 site includes a Mimaki wide-format printer, finishing equipment from Morgana Systems, a Vivid Matrix laminating machine, a digital die-cutter from Intec, and a flatbed UV printer from Inktec.
The old Pro C7100 remains in the factory as back-up.
Twenty 10 Digital offers digital print, print management, wide-format and finishing and has worked with various customers including The National Gallery and Suzuki. Personal golf balls have become a big part of business production in the last 12 months.
The company has four members of staff with an expected turnover this year of £300,000-£350,000.