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PRODUCT PORTFOLIO DIGITAL
Words Simon Eccles
ME & MY...
Canon Océ
VarioPrint i300
Following a review, it became clear that inkjet was a gamechanger,
providing high quality and productivity at reduced costs
Normally PrintWeek rounds off
its Me & My Machine case
studies with the question
“would you buy it again?”
Latcham Direct pre-empted
us by installing a second
Canon Océ VarioPrint i300
inkjet press in January this
year, about six months after its first. The sheer
productivity of these inkjet presses has allowed
Latcham to handle colour work in-house that
had previously been outsourced to litho
printers for fixed content, then personalised
on digital toner presses.
Set up in 2010 by Mike Hughes, who is MD,
Latcham Direct provides marketing and document
fulfilment services to the financial
services, membership, local authority, health
and utilities sectors. It has grown steadily both
through sales efforts and the acquisitions of
two other companies – CompuStat in 2018,
then on-demand digital print and creative
specialist Accent in November 2019. Its turnover
is currently about £15m.
In these unusual and difficult recent weeks,
it’s been kept very busy supplying vital communications
for the NHS, local authorities and
other essential services.
It’s particularly
promoting the hybrid
mail service it
launched last year,
combining several
documents from separate
sources (or even
customers) in the same envelope/enclosure.
“It’s early days yet, but as remote working
becomes more common, we envision more
organisations outsourcing their printing to our
centre, where we manage it for them and they
don’t have to touch it,” says Hughes.
Latcham’s 8,360sqm production site in
Bristol operates a range of digital print solutions
including high-speed continuous inkjet
web, as well as high-quality sheetfed inkjet and
toner-based devices. Last September, it
installed a Duplo iSaddle Pro saddle stitcher,
bringing total investment in 2019 to £1m
including equipment and the Accent takeover.
Latcham also has offices in Crawley.
Hughes says: “Our customers demand a
Printweek April & May 2020
high level of service quality and compliance.
Having replaced one Xerox iGen printer with
our first i300 last year, we decided to replace
all of our cut-sheet colour digital printers with
Canon equipment, including a second i300
and two toner C850/910 machines. These now
sit alongside our Ricoh InfoPrint 5000 continuous
inkjet and four Xerox mono printers.”
Why choose the Canon i300?
The existing Xerox iGen and DocuColor sheetfed
toner presses were coming to the end of
their contract periods. “Colin Mattinson,
Latcham’s operations director, carried out a
detailed review of all equipment available and
it became clear that inkjet was a gamechanger,
providing high quality and productivity
with reduced cost per page,” says Hughes.
As well as transferring work from the old
machines, the greater quality and efficiency of
the inkjet press allowed Latcham to transfer
litho pre-print work back in-house. Hughes
says: “The i300 has been a game-changer,
enabling us to provide highly-quality, just-intime
digital colour. Our customers just can’t
tell the difference between high-quality inkjet
and litho.
“Much of the mono work has also been
moved onto the i300, which would not have
been cost-effective under the previous model
where we had both colour and mono toner
devices.
Latcham decided to purchase its second
i300 to boost capacity and provide back-up
contingency as its customers require strict
service levels.
Was anything else considered?
“Latcham had already invested in the Ricoh
IP5000 colour inkjet web press in 2017 to
replace our continuous toner devices and to
deliver colour letters and forms,” says Hughes.
“We did look at other web presses and there
COMPANY PROFILE
Latcham Direct is an established print, data,
digital, marketing and fulfilment provider
based in Bristol. It was set up in 2010 by Mike
Hughes and now has a turnover of about
£15m. Its production site in Bristol provides
direct mail, marketing and fulfilment services
to local authorities, health, financial services,
utilities and member organisations.
Latcham’s first Canon VarioPrint i300 B3
sheetfed inkjet press allowed it to increase
capacity for high-quality print with more
speed and efficiency, at a lower
environmental cost. A second i300 was added
six months later. It also installed Canon
ImagePress C850 and 910 colour toner
printers to replace Xerox colour toner
machines. It uses Ricoh IP5000 colour inkjet
presses for its high-speed high-volume
needs. Xerox digital presses are still used for
monochrome work, although Latcham finds
the i300 is also cost-effective for mono.
What has it brought to the company?
“The i300 allows us to print faster and more
efficiently, allowing us to take on extra
work,” says MD Mike Hughes. “In addition to
boosted efficiency, not having to deal with
recycling cartridges – simply refilling the
machine with ink instead – is something
both our staff and the environment
appreciate.”
are some impressive machines in the market,
but they were either too expensive, too big or
didn’t provide the flexibility we need to service
shorter run transactional and direct marketing
work.”
What’s a VarioPrint i300?
When Canon introduced the B3 format
VarioPrint i300 in 2015, it was one of the first
relatively low-cost but high-performance
sheetfed inkjet presses – previously sheetfed
inkjets had been mostly B2 format, which
were relatively slow and much more expensive.
It was introduced under the Océ brand
name, recently renamed Canon Production
Print. It was followed by the slower, lower cost
i200 to make what Canon calls the i-Series.
At Drupa 2016, Canon added ColorGrip,
which prints priming liquid underneath every
colour drop, to print on uncoated offset papers,
or with higher quality on inkjet coated grades.
Direct mail and transactional printers
moving from SRA3 dry toner presses were the
main target from the start, with Canon claiming
that the i300 was the most productive
digital press in its class. Today it says that the
250 machines installed worldwide have an
average uptime of 94%.
Although an i300 costs more than high-end
toner Kodak NexPresses and Xerox iGens, it is
twice as fast with speeds up to 300 A4 ppm,
while ink costs are lower than toner click rates.
With experience under the Latcham operators’
belts, Hughes says that the costings are
now apparent. He says: “The cost per page
varies depending on the ink coverage, so you
What really stands out is the
sheer efficiency of these
machines – with constant output, they
are real workhorses” Mike Hughes