The Barnsley small-format digital and litho trade printer installed the device, which cost around £250,000, in May, replacing a five-year old Xerox Color 1000.

The machine has joined an MGI Meteor and a Xerox Color 800 and is producing short-run work such as on demand printing of books, high-end collateral, photo specialty products, brochures, flyers, postcards, newsletters, catalogues and manuals.

Co-director Dan Brook said investing in the new iGen was the result of an increase in short-run work being taken on by the business recently. 

"It's really given us the extra capacity we had hoped for," he said. "It's really not that much faster than the 1000, but the up-time is what gets you more production from it. It doesn't take as long to change paper over and being that much further up the production range, it's much more robust." 

He added: "We've seen digital grow over the past five or six years to quite a large proportion of our turnover. We thought long and hard about where to invest and with the iGen the colour quality and consistency is fantastic from edge to edge, so it just made sense."

Brook said the reliability of the iGen4 had given the business the confidence to move to a double day shift pattern.

Earlier this year the £2m-turnover business, which Brook runs with business partner Glyn Johnson, took on seven new employees increasing headcount to 28, after the installation of an Anapurna M2050i wide-format printer. The business bought the device as an add-on to attract POS and retail work. 

"We're looking for these investments to help us ramp turnover up by around £750,000 to £1m over the next 12 months," Brook said. 

Brook said he would start looking for a new B2 printer with UV capability later this year to add to the firm’s existing litho section, which includes a B3 two-colour Heidelberg GTO and a two-colour and a five-colour Hans Gronhi as well as a five-colour B2 Komori Lithrone. The new device will replace the Komori.

"The Komori is far from falling over, it's really done a fantastic job for us, but it's around 10 years old so we're looking for the extra productivity we can get with a new press and the sort of speed of turnaround we can achieve with a UV press," Brook said.