Remous first to Komori H-UV in South West

Print Solutions

Dorset’s Remous Print will become the first printer in the South West of England to install an H-UV equipped Komori when it takes delivery of its B2 Lithrone S529 with H-UV curing in October.

Managing director Alan Bunter said, ‘We needed a new press flexible enough to help us grow our commercial work but also to handle more packaging; in specifying H-UV on the new Lithrone, we see this latest Komori as a fully fledged packaging press. It has skeleton cylinders, provides a clean, powder free finish and dries instantly and with its 200 mm plinth, the delivery stack has the capacity for more sheets. Although, on the specialist packaging work, run lengths can be as low as 100, we do handle longer runs and the extra pile height will be useful on heavyweights such as 600 g/m2 carton board.’

‘On the commercial front, there’s a continuing tendency for the use of uncoated paper, some customers specifying nothing else. This move away from gloss materials is bringing with it an increased opportunity for us to add spot varnishes, for example, on images, which is why we specified a fifth unit on our H-UV Komori,’ he added.

Remous first examined the H-UV process at Komori’s European Graphic Technology Centre in Utrecht. ‘We saw that with its instant drying, the ink stayed on the surface of the sheet, even on uncoated materials, creating a high quality finish and maintaining subtleties in the images, which would have been lost through the dry back of conventional inks,’ said Alan. The company followed up with a visit to a large commercial printer in France who installed, in quick succession, a combination of three B2 and B1 Komori’s with H-UV curing.

‘When we tested a Komori S529 with H-UV curing on our section work we were changing sections in three minutes and with no spray powder needed and no scuffing,’ he continued. ‘On multi-section work such as a regular 70 section compendium we produce, eliminating spray powder also considerably reduces the frequency of blanket washing and when you add the ability to finish jobs immediately, we were convinced that by using the H-UV process, we could take out both our existing S529 and our two colour Heidelberg SM74 perfector and still turn jobs round faster with time left for more work.’

He added, ‘That first Lithrone made us competitive on short runs and as the demand for smaller run lengths increased during the recession, you could say that the financial downturn actually worked wonders for short run printers such as ourselves with highly competitive production facilities!

‘Now, the H-UV Lithrone will move us further forward, blurring the lines between digital and offset for short run work and giving us the edge on longer runs with its 16,000 an hour production speed. We’ve developed our online print and marketing services over the years and, coinciding with the installation of the new H-UV Lithrone, we’ll be releasing our new website and using social media to offer regularly updated marketing advice and print tips.’