Installed in the past few months, the machine has replaced an older Xerox Versant and joins a Versant 80 and four D136 mono printers from Xerox plus Canon wide-format printers and a raft of finishing kit.

The Iridesse uses the Fiery RIP and prints 120 A4 pages per minute on all stock weights, from 52 to 400gsm. It offers the option to take long sheets up to 1,200mm and prints CMYK with optional fifth and sixth colours including clear, white, gold and silver.

University of Bristol print services manager Amanda Gallacher told Printweek: “The biggest impact has been the quality and being able to do longer print runs and get the quality out. It’s a very secure way of printing and gives the confidence of being able to run a lot of jobs on it on a daily basis without having the error rate.

“The Iridesse is a bit more of a workhorse [than the Versant] and the slightly higher volume that you can get through it means that we can keep lower volume litho work in-house.”

She added: “On the speciality side of it, we’re also now keeping invitations in-house. Where we’d have previously used a foil block or something like that, we’re now using our designers to do something using the Iridesse, which provides them with a slightly different special effect; so that might be using a white, which we’re using a lot, or a silver.”

Gallacher said the machine, which was supplied directly by Xerox, was selected following a review of the market.

“We went to see Minuteman Press in Bath, who have also got an Iridesse, and they were very helpful. We wanted a machine that could just jump through the work, with high quality and good registration, and that’s what Minuteman showed us the machine could do. It’s a really solid colour digital machine.”

Employing eight staff and turning over more than £1m, the print operation serves the university’s schools and departments, printing items including lecture notes, flyers, leaflets, booklets and invitations, plus student work including posters and hard- or soft-copy dissertations and theses. It also carries out a range of external printing for local businesses and the trade.

Gallacher added: “Scanning is the next big thing that we’re looking at. Bread and butter mono work is reducing so we’re looking at how to fill that shortfall. Colour and wide-format are definitely increasing though.”