The Mitcham-based firm, which specialises in packaging, point-of-sale and advertising material for the music industry, hopes to keep more work in-house as a result of its investment in the portrait-format machine.

Managing director Steve Hodges (pictured) said the firm’s existing Xerox DocuColor presses, while fine on the short-run market, had proved unable to compete on longer-run work.

He said: "They were fine when we were asked to produce up to 1,000 prints, but when they came back and wanted another 25,000, we couldn’t do it profitably.

"We did consider buying a conventional lithographic press, but we soon shied away from it because nobody at the company had any offset experience. Quite frankly, the prospect scared the living daylights out of us."