Baden Kirgan’s Jefferies Printing Services has slashed digital turnaround time with the install of a new Fuji Xerox Versant 2100 with inline finishing.

The Plockmatic Pro35 finishing module attached to the new cutsheet production printer means the Sydney firm can produce saddle-stitched magazines, books, and booklets in one pass with one operator.

Kirgan says the setup, an upgrade from a five-year-old Fuji Xerox Color 700 Press, will cut costs by 20 per cent and significantly reduce turnaround.

“We do lots of runs between 50 and 300 of various magazines and books so our main goal in buying the new press was to reduce production steps and speed things up when producing small runs,” he says.

[Related: Review of the Versant 2100]

“We were printing them on the 700 and doing ganged stitching runs on our Horizon line, but the Horizon was getting very old and just wasn’t coping with the thicker books or glossier stocks.

“Now we can do a run of 100 magazines in 40 minutes, while it used to take that long just to print it and then another two hours to cut and bind it, so we are saving about two hours and two operators.”

Kirgan says the first job was a series of art prints for a group of US and Canadian artists visiting Sydney for the Supanova pop culture Expo two weeks ago.

“The quality was really quite amazing and they loved how it came out, they said it was better than the stuff they could get at home,” he says.

“The press is fantastic and is going to make a huge difference to how we work.”

The whole inline unit is about 10 metres long so installing it meant knocking down a wall and rearranging the entire digital press room. It is only the second Plockmatic D35 to be paired with a Versant 2100 in Australia.

While Kirgan will keep the Color 700 around, he is hoping the inline finishing process will be so efficient that he can get rid of the Horizon kit and use the floor space for something else.

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