A Rho P10 160, six-colour (CMYK, light cyan and light magenta) plus white, was the first to arrive in Chessington, Surrey, yesterday.
A Rho P10 250 HS will join it in Chessington and another six-colour-plus-white Rho P10 160 will be installed in Glasgow, both in August.
The machines will replace an Inca Onset S20 and an EFI Vutek QS3200, which are due to be removed after the Chessington machines are installed.
The St Ives Group-owned wide-format specialist, which has a turnover of £38m and 300 staff, has not revealed how much money it has put into the upgrade, although technical sales director Nigel Franklin said it was “a considerable sum”.
The company already runs a number of Durst Rho machines.
“We very much like the Durst print quality. They are robust, they are reliable, and we get an extremely good response to service requests. In the main we’ve had a good experience working with those guys,” Franklin said.
He added that the company likes the flexibility of the printers, which can print on both roll and rigid media.
The print quality also stands up to very close viewing, something the market demands, Franklin said.
“With the construction market the expectation is for very high quality and the lead times are pretty short. We’ve had to work in the same way for the retail and interiors markets,” he added.
The 1.6m-wide Rho 160 can print at speeds of up to 100sqm/hr and resolutions of up to 1,000dpi, printing roll-to-roll up to 2mm thick and on boards up to 40mm thick, with a maximum media weight of up to 20kg.
The 2.5m-wide Rho P10 250 HS features LED Pin curing and has twice as many printheads as the non-HS P10 200 or 250 machines. It prints at up to 400sqm/hr and at up to 1,000dpi.
Service Graphics’ Skelmersdale site is also seeing investment: an SMRE Engineering SM-375-TA multi-tool static-bed cutting-plotter is due to be installed next month.
The company expects this to double its current laser cutting capacity on fabric and also enable the business to cut acrylics in-house.
Franklin said it would cater to the “increasing demand for dye-sublimation printing” at Skelmersdale.
Franklin added: “The vast majority of work at Skelmersdale is now dye-sub. We were in the market pretty early, five years ago, and we’ve gradually built on that.”
Service Graphics managing director Katy Bonnor, said: “There is nothing on the market that can match the quality of print while still maintaining the high level of productivity provided by this new equipment. We are excited to be able to offer our clients the highest standard of technology and state-of-the-art performance.”
