According to managing director Bruce Stephen of BGS high-pile five-colour printing is the way of the future for small to medium-sized commercial printing businesses, with four colours and a varnish the equation that now underpins the printing strategy at BGS.

It was the thinking behind BGS’ decision to order a Shinohara 52 V HP, a five-colour perfector, as an upgrade to its former Shinohara four-colour perfector. Before that, the company owned a Shinohara two-colour perfector.

Stephen sees the fifth printing unit as a critical element, he says, “Over the past 18 months or so, we’ve been using a varnish extensively on a lot of our printing work and doing it off-line was hindering us.

“Now we can run CMYK plus a varnish in-line. We have clients where we run three-over-one, four-over-four, two-over-two, and we can do it all in the one pass”.

BGS, located at Kilsyth in Melbourne’s outer east, prints a wide range of jobs, mainly in the A3 format – brochures, books, matte art – and the demand for jobs with a coat or varnish is steadily increasing.

Stephen says, “It’s not that customers are demanding a varnish – but they like what they see when the job is coated and now we have the speed and productivity of doing this completely in-line”.

Stephen said appearance is not the only factor that has encouraged a fifth station as a coater. “We’ve found bindery times are quicker, the jobs are able to handle better on a guillotine.

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