Screaming Colour orders first UK Motioncutter

Screaming Colour has become the first UK printer to buy a Motioncutter high-speed digital laser cutter.

The circa-€200,000 (£167,122) machine will be installed at Screaming Colour’s London site in April. 

The sheet-fed device cuts, perforates and engraves in one pass and features Namecut technology which can personalise a sheet by reading a CSV file of data and cutting or engraving the information.

Screaming Colour will use the Motioncutter to produce high-end invites, direct mail packs and high-end pitch and proposal documents.

“We have CAD cutting already but it's much slower and can’t cut as intricately, whereas with the laser you can get very fine details and patterns,” said commercial director Mark Evans.

“With this we can cut personalised details on personalised pieces coming off our HP Indigos, or introduce personalisation at the finishing stage. We could do corporate event invites for instance with people’s names cut out on the envelope.” 

The investment follows a recent installation of a Kolbus Casemaker DA260 at the company’s Slough site. 

“We have significant in-house finishing capabilities and we just felt these added more strings to our bow,” commented Evans.

The Motioncutter was developed by Themediahouse, a German company specialising in personalised direct mail and packaging. It developed the machine when it couldn’t find a commercial cutter to suit its needs.

It was first shown at North Print & Pack in May 2013, with the official launch at November’s Dscoop Grand Prix event in Rome.

There are currently two Motioncutters installed at German sites and seven elsewhere in Europe, with Themediahouse reporting several other UK installs in the pipeline. It expects to complete another UK order at Ipex 2014 (24-29 March).

The machine cuts at up to 6m/s and boasts a compact footprint. Sheets of up to 580mm wide can be fed either inline from a press or from a sheet feeder onto a conveyor system made of a special metal mesh belt. 

The sheets move continually through the working area while the 230W laser tracks them, fumes are extracted through an encapsulated tubefan system, and a separation zone at the end of the conveyor removes waste.