The Chelmsford, Essex-based company offers plan printing, CAD plotting and large-format printing and scanning services to clients in the AEC industries.

Its 17 staff produces hundreds of thousands of metres of monochrome print each year and tens of thousands of colour. It previously used a KIP8 8000 and a KIP 9000 to print black on white and two Canon Océ ColorWave 650s for the rest.

But the company is increasingly being asked to produce mixed sets of both monochrome and colour output and previously had to print to separate machines and manually collate the output afterwards.

Managing director Graham Taylor said the process had wasted too much time and so he looked for a machine that could do it all. Since the new printer went in a month ago, he has been really happy with its performance.

He said he particularly likes the 1.2m-wide Canon's job submission process and how Publisher Select links to the Doc Hosting Development Portal tool.

“Our old LED systems had done well over a million metres each. We’ve had our money’s worth out of them. We looked at the HP option and the KIP option but I used to work for Océ years ago and I feel the software is geared up for our industry,” he said.  

“You can throw a job at it and it’s easy. “Everyone in the print room feels so comfortable with it and it’s pushing the work out four or five times faster than it’s done before. It’s killed weekend overtime.”

The Océ ColorWave 910 was launched, along with sister machine, the 810 in October 2015, when they were billed as the fastest digital wide-format printers in the market. The 910 runs at up to 18sqm/min according with up to six different rolls of media at any given time.

Taylor started his business with “a manky old photocopier and a plotter” in 2002 and now turns over just under £800,000 from Chelmsford and a three-person site in Colchester. Reprohouse runs another KIP 9000 which he plans to replace around June.

“The objective is to take on more volume and this Océ is the tool that’s going to allow us to do it. A big pro is that it allows the splitting of the black and white and colour,” he said.

“Our KIPs are five, six and seven years old, we’ve bled them to death.”

Architecture practice Rogers Stirk Harbour & Partners (RSHP) became the first global customer to buy a Canon Océ ColorWave 910 in December for its new building in the City of London.