Octink boosts productivity with major Durst spend

Octink has increased its print productivity up to ten fold with a £500,000 investment in two Durst wide-format printers and a Caldera workflow.

The Brentford-based firm’s investment also included building works to accommodate the new machines and staff training.

“It’s been a major change throughout production from the studio to the cutter,” said operations director Brad Candy.

“We’d been running Onyx in the studio for 15 years, so switching RIPs to Caldera was a big step, but it was actually the easiest part.”

The two Durst machines are a 2.5m-wide P10 250 and a 1.6m-wide P10 160, which replaced two Inca Spyder 320s and an HP XL2750.

The first Durst, the 250, arrived at the end of January and the second at the end of March.

“Our Inca Spyders were fantastic machines but they were old and we had to run them slowly to get the quality we needed,” said Candy. “For what we wanted Durst came out as the winner, in particular for the quality and the colour and its reputation for service.”

The P10 250 is configured for flatbed work, in particular 8’x4’ boards for site hoardings. For that application it was essential that the long edges of the sheets matched, so Durst supplied the registration table from its flagship Rho 10000 to ensure board-to-board registration and continuous throughput.

“We’re getting between four and 10 times the output from the 250 as from the pair of Spyders, I’m well pleased,” said Candy.