Business News

Fujifilm is first choice for the road to greener print

Thursday 09. September 2010 - DCL Print goes ‘lo-chem’ with Fujifilm for greener print, shorter lead times and increased productivity

DCL Print Ltd was first established as a business forms print supplier in the early eighties. In 2004, it was bought by Simon Smode and Robin Humphries to become joint owners with one of the founders, Gary Curran. The company was originally based in Feltham, Middlesex, but moved to its existing site in Crawley, West Sussex, in 2006. With an annual turnover of £3.5million and 44 employees, DCL Print advocates a strong environmental policy. It already has FSC & PEFC accreditations as well as a continuous waste reduction programme, and is also working towards the ISO 14001 standard.

The company’s premises of approx. 30,000ft2 house an impressive plant list, including a Muller Martini 8-colour UV web press with online re-moist gluing, a Heidelberg Speedmaster SM74, a 4-colour Drent Gazelle, a Comco Cadet 5-colour label printer and three Morgan presses. In addition, DCL also boasts an extensive finishing and digital department.

Since the new management team took over in 2004, DCL has diversified its business forms print service offering to include mailers, labelling, envelopes and mailing & fulfilment services, reaching out to a wide range of commercial businesses throughout the UK. The expansion, which included the addition of a number of new presses, also meant investment in a new CTP solution and, in August 2007, DCL chose Fujifilm for this.

Andy Ray, studio manager, played an integral role in streamlining its prepress production: “When we first looked at different CTP devices, I was keen for DCL to go with Fujifilm. Over the years in previous jobs, I’d come to rely on and trust Fujifilm’s products. And, although we also tested other devices, in our opinion Fujifilm still offered the best solution.”

Earlier this year, as part of the company’s ongoing efforts to provide a greener service offering, together with the need to maximise production levels, DCL upgraded to Fujifilm’s Luxel V-6 platesetter with autoloader together with low-chemistry Brillia HD PRO-V plates.

Robin comments: “DCL continuously strives to better its environmental credentials, which aligns with some of our customers’ requirements for ‘greener’ print. Furthermore, we are noticing that our customers are ordering shorter print runs, which means that we need to focus on reducing our lead times in order to stay competitive. Fujifilm’s Luxel V-6 platesetter and PRO-V plates allow us to minimise wastage, while keeping up with our production schedule.”

“We have seen considerable water savings with the Luxel V-6 platesetter, coupled with massive chemistry savings with the PRO-V plates, which also work perfectly with our vegetable-based UV inks,” says Andy. “There is no compromise on quality, making this upgrade the most environmentally friendly option for us.

DCL Print is not only reaping the environmental benefits, but is also seeing a massive improvement in output. Andy continues: “With the new platesetter and plates, our output levels have more than doubled from 10 to 24 plates per hour. The autoloader also means that we can leave the device unsupervised overnight to produce the next day’s plates and, because of its reliability, we rarely have to remake any.”

Brillia HD PRO-V is the latest Fujifilm plate designed to simplify the pre-press process, which has proved to be the case with DCL Print. It uses less chemistry, requires less maintenance of the finishing unit and produces less waste than its processed alternatives. In addition, the replenisher normally required to control the pH or conductivity of the bath is no longer needed. Thanks to Fujifilm’s ‘high sensitivity polymerisation’ technology, Brillia HD PRO-V also brings unmatched quality, consistency and productivity to plate production, being capable of 1-99% resolutions (with a Fujifilm ‘HD capable’ platesetter), and able to print FM screens.

Fujifilm’s Luxel V-6 platesetter employs Fujifilm’s patented violet photopolymer CTP technology, used across the Luxel V range of platesetters. It offers a highly flexible format size, from 279x 686mm, allowing creation from some duplicator sizes up to the largest B2 presses, achieving 24pph at 2,400dpi. It also offers a minimum plate size option of 320x290mm landscape and 279x381mm portrait, and can handle a variety of plate gauges including 0.15mm, 0.2mm, 0.24mm and 0.3mm.

Robin concludes: “Fujifilm has been a trusted prepress partner for years, and we have nothing but praise for the products and service we have received to date. We would recommend them to any print service provider looking to simplify, diversify or improve their production line or service offering.”