In a move that echoes the Océ and InfoPrint installations made by the major transactional printers in the past 18 months, SEMA has fired up one Impika iPrint eVolution press in Sydney and is expected to commission one in Melbourne within two months.
SEMA chief sales and marketing officer Brian Smith told ProPrint that the price tag for the two presses plus new data and composition technology came to around $10 million.
He said the company’s two biggest rivals “already have this type of [press] technology”.
Salmat’s Océ Jetstream 2200s can reach 150 metres per minute (mpm) or 2,200 A4 full-colour pages per minute (ppm). Computershare’s Ricoh InfoPrint 5000s can hit 128mpm or 1,832ppm.
The Impika machines at SEMA are slower than these rivals, offering full-colour printing at 76mpm or 1,024ppm at the “standard resolution” of 600x600dpi.
However, the capacity can be doubled in the field by adding two print heads or quadrupled for duplex printing with the addition of a turn bar and a second tower, according to Impika.
The manufacturer talked up the quality credentials of the iPrint presses, claming they have “the largest range of print quality among industrial inkjet printers”.
The presses offer a wide range of resolutions depending on press speed, from 360dpi at 125mpm up to 1,200dpi at 40mpm.
Output can be doubled by adding to print heads to reach a speed of 75-250mpm.
One of the eVolutions was installed in SEMA’s Sydney plant in December and commissioned in early March. The other is expected to arrive in Melbourne in April or May. They will be configured identically.
Smith said the twin-engine duplex machines were not direct replacements, but would probably pick up work that was currently being handled by other presses.
SEMA’s review process started in early 2011 and resulted in tenders from six other manufacturers, which Smith declined to name.
He said the eVolution had stood out due to its quality, scalability and “rich IPDS control set”. Another selling point was how complementary the machine was for SEMA finishing lines, particularly envelope inserters.
The iPrint eVolution will be launched at Drupa in May. Smith said SEMA would be also be in Düsseldorf to look at the “ever evolving” inkjet market.
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