Colour Central is aiming to create five digital print hubs, one each in Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, Brisbane and Perth. Loosely based on the concept of fractional ownership. Total investment if all five hubs get off the ground is likely to be around the $25m mark.

Colour Concept is promoting itself to printers as a new way to capitalise on the digital print boom without investing heavily in equipment, staff, overheads or maintenance.

For their $40,000, payable upfront, printers will get between $3000 and $7000 worth of digital colour print per month at cost price. Operations manager Phillip Parson says this should be around 15c per A4 colour page.

Colour Central is owned by a company called Mobile Activ, which is a mobile phone content provider. Mobile Activ is about to launch several new products to the mobile market to capitalise on the massive changes about to take place in mobile with the advent of 3G and HDSPA, products which will require 40 million pages of printed variable data annually, so has decided to create the Colour central concept, partly to secure its own supply of digital print.

Unit holder (printers who pay the $40,000) will sign up for a four year service.

Phillip Parsons, previously managing director at Network Services (part of ACP) says, "We aim to have the business up and running by Christmas."

Colour Central needs to have 20 Unit Holders signed up before operations will begin. It is targeting 40 Unit Holders as the point at which its production equipment is doubled up. Each hub will have two Fuji Xerox iGen3s, two Fuji Xerox Nuvera 144s, Canon IFP 9000 wide format printers, GBC Voyager 3 Celloglazing machines, and finishing equipment.

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