The Ricoh was installed on 14 July and replaces an outgoing Konica Minolta bizhub Pro c6000, which had reached the end of its life after four and a half years in operation. It was MTP’s first digital machine.

The Ricoh joins a recently installed Canon iPF8400, purchased for wide-format work, which replaced an HP Designjet in April.

MTP director Alistair Sanderson said he and joint director Dean Lowes had been looking for a new digital printer since March. 

Sanderson said: “The Ricoh is the best fit for our business to be honest. We went to see lots of competitor machines and the print quality is similar but the Ricoh offered a little bit more for us in that we can run longer sheets (720mm), landscape and three-panel A4 and the vacuum-fed tracer is built in.”

The Ricoh also has a fifth-colour option, which Sanderson said makes MTP the only printer in Cumbria to be able to offer this. He is yet to promote the option but feels it can give a big boost to the business.

“We’re going to send a swatch out to customers to let them know but we need to get comfortable with it first and make sure we know what situations are best to use it in.

“For the price we paid for it, it’s worth having because it gives you something else to sell. We have quite a few design customers who like Kraft-style stock so with it we have the option to print white then overprint. So it gives us more flexibility for short-run print.”

It prints at speeds of up to 90ppm, with quality up to 1,200x4,800dpi.

Along with the new Ricoh and the Canon, MTP also has a five-colour Sakurai 575SDW B2 press, purchased in April 2014, which it uses for all its litho work. Litho work makes up approximately 80%-85% of its turnover.

It recently used the Sakurai to print 5,000 copies of a food festival cookbook for celebrity chef Nigel Haworth, chef patron of the local Northcote Hotel. This was a 304-page landscape B4 casebound book, with mixed media of silk and offset stock.

MTP does most of its finishing in-house, including die-cutting, and recently took on outsourced work from local Cumbrian printer Pagefast, during its period out of operation after its premises were severely damaged by Storm Desmond.

The company is also considering taking on a new apprentice in its digital and finishing department. Sanderson said he will probably be advertising for one in the next week.

The 10-staff business is looking to improve on last year’s turnover by £60,000 by the end of this financial year, bringing it up to £820,000.