UK large-format POS specialist Best Digital has boosted production capacity by 50% after investing in a Screen Truepress Jet W3200UV HS wide-format flat-bed printer. The new machine, which has been part-funded with a £50,000 grant from the UK’s Regional Growth Fund, features CMYK plus light cyan and light magenta and two opaque white ink channels. It joins a Screen Truepress Jet 2500UV hybrid wide-format printer at Best’s Welwyn Garden City plant and replaces a Screen Truepress Jet W1632UV.
Founded in 2008 by joint Managing Directors Geoff Rawlings and Danny Colegate, Best produces POS, exhibition and display graphics for retailers, agencies, brand owners and print management companies. The company employs 12 people, is on target for sales of just under £2 million this year and has a reputation for producing high-quality work at the right price and on time, backed by a full design-to-print-to-installation support package.
Geoff Rawlings says that a quest for higher productivity while maintaining substrate flexibility and quality lies behind the investment in the Truepress Jet W3200UV HS. “The Truepress Jet W1632UV has been superb, but we needed a faster machine to keep up with demand — which is why we went for the HS specification. Compared to the Truepress Jet W1632UV’s 94 square metres an hour we can run the Truepress Jet W3200UV HS at 150 square metres per hour and achieve excellent quality. It’s also going to help us increase our presence in new markets — the white ink capability, for example, delivers perfect back-up white for printing on coloured and transparent materials. It’s also proving remarkably flexible across a wide range of work, from small-format packaging to large-format wall panels.”
Geoff adds that pairing the new printer with the existing Truepress Jet 2500UV preserves the benefits Best gets from having two machines that use the same proprietary Screen Truepress inks. These include being able to guarantee consistent colour on jobs produced using both machines
The Truepress Jet W3200UV HS is ideal for short-run, high-impact sign and display work, including exhibition graphics and retail signage, posters, product decoration, architectural signage, backlit displays — in fact any commercial graphic involving materials that require the support of a fixed table.
The design incorporates a number of features to increase both productivity and quality. The newly developed printhead modules and Truepress UV inks combine to produce sellable, top-quality graphics at high speed. Linear drives provide exceptionally smooth, controlled and accurate motion of the print carriage, while retractable lay pins provide fast substrate positioning to ensure accurate, repeatable registration, especially on double-sided printing. The multilayer function enables perfect inline registration of up to eight independent image layers for sophisticated front/back overprinting of quality backlit and variable day/night graphics.
