Dynamic’s centre for children and young people with disabilities provides help and support to children and families, whilst Candlelighters is a charity helping families dealing with children’s cancer.

Marie Woodhead, partner marketing manager at Konica Minolta (UK), helped organise the collection and commented, ‘Being able to help these charities and the families who rely on them is such a rewarding experience. By working together as a team and with Konica Minolta’s resources, we can do so much more than we ever could individually.’

Iain Blackwood Hobbs, partnerships executive, Candlelighters, stated, ‘From everyone at Candlelighters, we’d like to say a huge thank you to Konica Minolta, not just for their fundraising but for also donating the chocolate eggs. This lovely gesture will bring some joy to the children at Leeds Children’s Hospital, and to their families affected by childhood cancer this Easter.’

Gillian Anderson, environment, social and Governance partner at Konica Minolta (UK), concluded, ‘I am extremely proud of the hard work our Social Impact Group are doing for the charities our employees have voted to support this year. From collecting chocolate eggs to spending the day volunteering, we want to help make a meaningful difference to those who deserve it most.’

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The high-speed UV inkjet press, AccurioJet 60000, is explained to be capable of producing 6000 sheets per hour along with duplex printing capabilities. The press produces high image quality and reproduction stability across a range of media, taking advantage of Konica Minolta’s inline sensors and a spectrophotometer to automatically monitor printing conditions.

Visitors to Konica Minolta at drupa will also be the first to see the AccurioPress C84hc, which uses high chroma toner. Free from the restrictions imposed by the colour gamut of ordinary toner, prints are said to be more consistent across bright and vivid colours.

The company will also introduce Myiro colour management tools for graphics arts applications. Developed by Konica Minolta’s Sensing Business Unit, these tools include spectrophotometers for colour management and high-speed auto scanning.

Konica will be joined on the stand by MGI (MGI Digital Printing Systems) showing its new JetSeal and inline die cutter, as well as launching an advanced version of its AccurioPro Colour Manager software suite.

Also joining Konica Minolta will be Industrial Inkjet (IIJ), a specialist in bespoke inkjet customisation, which exclusively uses Konica Minolta print heads in its products; and Plockmatic, a supplier of finishing options, as well as Acco and Fiery.

Konica Minolta will also be running fully automated production lines driven by artificial intelligence, and will show the use of robotics that includes the premiere of a Cobot arm.

Jon Hiscock, head of production and industrial print at Konica Minolta (UK), stated, ‘As a major player in digital production printing it is our mission to promote and support the shift from analogue to digital print. In doing so, we will build a world where high-value-added printed materials are created efficiently with minimal environmental impact.’

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The LXa5 is said to offer photorealistic printing with Konica Minolta 6pl printheads delivering high resolution and variable dot capabilities. It prints with speeds up to 37sqm/hr and has a maximum resolution of 1440 x 726 dpi and can take media up to 100mm thick. It also has pneumatic pin registration designed for fast and accurate media placement and an anti-crash system to protect print heads.

Joey Kim, managing director at InkTec, said, ‘With Fespa’s theme being Opportunities Revealed, the exhibition is the ideal event to have the European launch of the Jetrix LXa5 printer. Positioned to appeal to those that are seeking to extend their wide format print offering or to potentially enter the sector for the first time, the printer totally reflects the overall sentiment of Fespa this year.’

InkTec’s stand will additionally be showcasing DTF and UV-DTF printing. The DTF solutions range will feature DTF printers, oven/shaker, film, inks and powder, while the UV-DTF solutions will aim to show produce designs that can be easily transfer directly onto hard, smooth objects and even irregular shapes.

Also shown at the exhibition will be the Jetrix XGR320, a 3.2m UV LED roll-to-roll printer with Ricoh Gen6 printheads.

InkTec will be showcasing its products at Fespa in Hall 1, Stand C72.

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As part of an experienced team, Mr Bladon will help organisations in the print and packaging sectors to harness Konica Minolta’s portfolio of digital print solutions. 

Mr Bladon has been working in the product and industrial print industry since 1987, where he began his career in the print room as an equipment operator. During a career in print spanning more than 35 years, he has held senior sales, business development and account management roles in the UK and Australia, specialising in delivering hardware and software that meet the changing needs of print businesses. Between 2012 and 2014 he was a senior account manager at Konica Minolta in Australia. 

Mr Bladon commented on the importance of selling products which he is knowledgeable in. ‘I am a printer by trade, so having confidence in the product I sell to print businesses is extremely important to me,’ he said.

‘Konica Minolta has a strong reputation for delivering innovative and reliable equipment that do their jobs effortlessly. The company offers commercial print companies a truly impressive portfolio whether they are looking for creative embellishment techniques, high-quality short-run label production, or high-volume digital inkjet print runs.’

Jon Hiscock head of production and industrial print at Konica Minolta stated, ‘Mark brings a wealth of experience from across the industry to our specialist team. His appointment is a sign of our commitment to the sector, as well as a response to the strong interest we are experiencing for our product portfolio, support, and services, as organisations recognise how truly transformative our digital solutions can be for their business.’

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The Morgana BM4035 can produce portrait-orientation publications from A6 to A4, as well as A4 landscape and large format 297 x 297mm books. It also has the ability to corner and edge staple as standard.

NPC Print founder and CEO Natalie Puttock explained the purchase, saying, ‘We needed to expand the range of formats that we could produce. Most importantly, the ability to produce long sheets, such as A4 landscape products, a format that has become increasingly popular in recent years – jobs that we have had to send out for finishing. The ability of the new BM4035 to produce this format in-house will give us control of that work, as well as saving us money on outwork.

‘Having recently taken the decision to upgrade our digital print device to a new Konica Minolta AccurioPress C4070 engine, the new binder will help us to show off both our print and in-house finishing capabilities to the fullest. The square-back capability of the binder is a feature that we can also promote for higher pagination publications – it gives the impression of a perfect bound book.

‘The binder will initially be manually fed, but as print quantities increase, we know that we can easily add an automated feeder on to the unit for higher productivity.’

The company uses other Morgana products in its post-press section, including a Morgana AutoCreaser and an Intec ColourFlare device for foiling and laminating, purchased through Morgana.

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The MGI-derived AccurioShine 3600 with iFoil One will enable Healeys to add spot UV and digital foil to short run work. Managing director Philip Dodd commented, ‘We had looked at the options for embellishment pre-Covid, but we felt the time was now right to enhance our creative options, to expand our customer offering, and to meet market demands. The AccurioShine 3600 enables us to differentiate our offering whilst enjoying the considerable benefits of flexibility that a digital solution brings.’

Mr Dodd also told Digital Printer at the time of the order signing that what Healeys would save on external finishing services would pay for the cost of the AccurioShine, and that the company would be looking at offering a trade service based around the machine to other printers and finishers, including the supplier it had been using for conventional foiling, for whom short runs were uneconomic.

The AccurioShine 3600 can add multiple coating and dimensional texture effects in a single pass on sheets up B3+ (364 x 750mm). Applications include enhancing business cards, greeting cards, photobook covers, and carton packaging consistent with the format. The machine also features artificial intelligence for registration, and an energy saving LED curing system. In combination with the iFoil One hot foil stamping module, it offers a range of high-impact finishing effects including personalised embossed foil. This can be used with variable data printing (VDP), to add impact to tickets, personalised packages and labels, invitations and one-to-one marketing items.

Richard Kilduff, channel manager for commercial printing at Konica Minolta UK, stated, ‘We are delighted to have partnered with Healeys Printers with their installation of the new AccurioShine 3600. It is an ideal solution for professional printers that are looking to lead the market and add real innovation to their traditional print offering. Digitising and automating manual embellishment processes allows for much greater flexibility and cost control, which in turn can drive business growth in new and interesting areas.’

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The investment, which includes the Intelligent Quality Care system which eliminates waste in the process and further improves WPG’s ISO 9001 & 14001 accreditations, comes after recent upgrades to WPG’s  litho and large format presses.

Paul Jones, WPG joint MD, said, ‘Not only are we amazed by the high quality print the new Konica press delivers, but also that it does so at an extremely fast speed, meaning we can take on more work and offer even quicker turnaround times for our customers.

‘Another hugely beneficial feature is the long sheet capability. Landscape brochures are a popular choice for a lot of our customers and previously, we have had to print them on our litho machines; this along with the larger range of media options, will increase the range of jobs we can offer to our customers.’

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What’s now called embellishment or special effects used to be a group of purely post-press operations. These included lamination, spot or flood varnishing and foiling (hot or cold). Other eye-catching things have always had to be done in or on the press – if you wanted metallic colours you had to use a special ink or print on a metallised substrate; the same applied for fluorescent or other special colours.

Digital print has blurred those boundaries, bringing a number of ways of achieving the same or ‘close enough’ effects, combined with the flexibility and minimal set-up requirements characteristic of digital print. These also split into in-press effects and subsequently-applied effects.

Before looking at these in detail, it’s also worth noting that a sustainability argument is emerging for digital embellishment as an alternative to more conventional processes. This comes from Scodix, which makes stand-alone ‘embellishment presses’ (distributed in the UK by Friedheim) that can apply a wide range of decorative effects to printed sheets, with full digital flexibility in each.

Scodix carried out a lifecycle assessment of its digital foiling options which found that compared to conventional hot stamp foiling, its version reduces CO2e (CO2 equivalent) by 85%, fossil fuel usage by nearly 85%, and water consumption by 80% per B1 sheet. The study, carried out by EcamRicert, and Mérieux NutriSciences Companies, compared the enhancement of a single B1 sheet through to 100,000 B1 sheets using Scodix foil (175g) versus traditional foiling methods.

That’s only one of the options that Scodix offers and there’s no indication given that any of the other supported techniques offer comparable advantages. However, like any other form of digital printing, it seems likely that overall wastage of materials and energy is likely to be lower simply through the ability to only print or finish the number required.

The main argument in favour of these types of effects though is that they add impact to printed products and therefore margin to your work. Some you can only do if you bought the right press, though they could also be a factor in choosing a new one. There’s an increasing number of toner presses that offer additional colours which may include clear ‘varnish’, white, fluorescent and metallic colours, though usually only one or sometimes two at a time.

Plus-one – or more

Machines that offer a fifth colour include Xerox’s iGen line and Ricoh’s Pro C7200, also sold by Heidelberg as the Versafire EV (and about to be replaced by the Pro C7500, though we’ve not seen any specification for this yet). Kodak’s Nexpress and Nexfinity models could do this too, with options over where in the laydown sequence the fifth colour went, though both are now discontinued. Moving up to six colours brings in the popular Xerox Iridesse, and the more recent Fujifilm Revoria, while most HP Indigos can handle up to seven colours, though of course click charges go up in proportion with all extra colour presses. Xerox also offers a conversion kit for two-pass printing on its entry-level PrimeLink C9065/C9070, which potentially allows the use of up to eight colours, albeit with a complete change of toner cartridges between passes.

The exact choice of extra colours varies by manufacturer, but in addition to white – for use on coloured or transparent substrates – and clear – used to create flood or spot varnish effects – fluorescent or ‘neon’ colours are offered, particularly pink and sometimes yellow. These can replace or be mixed with their standard CMYK equivalents to expand the colour gamut for more eye-catching effects. A few offer metallic toners too, which again can be printed solid or mixed to provide novel colours and finishes.

After the event

Post-press options are more about foiling, spot varnish and various creative lamination processes, often in combination. A good entry-level choice here is foil-over-toner, a two-pass method that uses ‘real’ foil in a laminator like Vivid’s Matrix models or those from Caslon, Foliant (sold via IFS), Komfi (from Friedheim) or Autobond. Similar options also come from GMP and Intec, now part of the Plockmatic group.

An entry-level option for foil-over-toner is Vivid’s Matrix, seen here at a trade show

In these, the initial colour print is first laminated with a clear film, then printed again with the foil pattern in black toner on top of the film, before a second pass through the laminator transfers the foil to the partially melted black toner. It’s a more labour-intensive process but it works with a very wide range of foil types and doesn’t require special consumables.

Then there are the fully ‘digital’ embellishment devices that offer spot UV and/or foiling in a single operation. This category includes devices like Duplo’s B2 DuSense 8000, which is offered in various configurations providing spot UV, digital foiling or both, including a pre-treatment option for expanding the types of print that can be handled. It’s also possible to build up textured ‘3D’ effects with multiple passes, which the smaller B3 DuSense 810 also supports. An alternative is the B3+ Konica Minolta AccurioShine 3600, which uses technology from MGI, in which Konica Minolta holds a significant stake. It too can produce ‘dimensional’ effects.

At the top end of the digital embellishment market are the ranges from Konica Minolta/MGI and Scodix. These are dedicated industrial production devices that offer UV varnish and foiling, with Scodix offering a particularly wide range of foils and finished effects, while MGI’s line goes up to B1 sheet size in the form of the print-and-embellish AlphaJet that was formally launched in October 2022. Kurz is another player at the industrial end of the scale, having bought Steinemann, whose inkjet varnish and foiling systems it was already marketing as Digital Metal. These include the sheet-fed B2 DM-Smartliner for 2D flat varnishing and foiling and the DM-Maxliner for raised and textured effects.

Whether you’re just ready to dip a toe into digital embellishment and cautious with the investment, or know that you’ve got a ready market for it but need to be sure it’s good enough and fast enough to meet your customers’ needs, there should be something to suit and help your work shine.

Preparing files for embellishment

All digital embellishment processes require ‘artwork’ to control where the effects are applied. Usually this means creating additional layers in the originating applications and/or print PDFs, though some vendors offer DFE-based tools to create embellishment guides or colour substitutions from standard PDFs on-the-fly.

Andrew Bailes-Collins of Ultimate Technographics, which makes imposition, nesting and ganging software, has written a handy guide to preparing generic PDFs that should process correctly through most embellishment vendors’ DFEs and thus avoid some of the common pitfalls that require manual reworking in the prepress studio.

Called PDF Creation for Digital Embellishment, it covers the use of spot colours, layers, knock-out and overprint and choice of correct versions of PDF for hand-off. It’s available free from Ultimate Technographics’ website.

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Successor to the AccurioPress 6136 series, the new range consists of three models: AccurioPress 7136, AccurioPress 7136P and AccurioPress 7120, all of which are said to enhance job capacity, reliability and flexibility. It can handle monthly peak volumes of up to 3.24 million A4 pages while offering what KM says is the highest media flexibility in its class, enabled by an intelligent paper catalogue and optional envelope fuser, covering media that includes coated and embossed paper from 40 to 350gsm.

High quality output without skilled expertise is enabled by 220 pre-uploaded paper profiles which help reduce errors and improve print quality. This can be further complemented by the optional IQ-501 Intelligent Quality Optimiser, which delivers automatic and real-time density and registration adjustment and creates printer profiles.

There are some 728 different finishing configuration possibilities, including Konica Minolta’s own-developed finishing such as the TU-510 inline trimming unit, which can slit and trim from small business cards to SRA3 sheets. The company also has established partnerships with finishing specialists such as GBC and Plockmatic.

Software integration with Konica Minolta’s AccurioPro Flux and other workflows, including those from third parties, is enabled by an open API. Accounting, authentication, or scan routing applications such as YSoft Safe Q and Nuance eCopy Sharescan are also supported.

Malcolm Smith, category manager – professional print at Konica Minolta UK, commented, ‘Konica Minolta continues its pioneering industry approach and drive to ignite new possibilities for customers with this latest evolution of our next generation series of monochrome products. Built upon the successful AccurioPress 6136 series, it is focused on delivering high performance print quality, production speeds, and application versatility that responds to evermore demanding market needs.

‘Efficient operation that minimises waste and maximises production times enables commercial printers and CRDs to ensure they are running as smoothly and profitably as possible. IQ-501 aids consistent production of perfect print while intelligent workflows can be effortlessly created. The print production process is then completed responsively by a versatile choice of high-quality finishing equipment.’

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AccurioShine 3600 is the first Konica Minolta-branded MGI product built on the success of the MGI JETvarnish 3D One. The press has been designed to offer special effects utilising the Jetvarnish technology, including the AIS SmartScanner registration system.

Originally based in the UAE, Sketches Int established its UK operations in 2019 to extend its high-quality bespoke print, labels, and packaging products to a new European audience. The Ruislip-based printing and design agency is utilising its new investment to produce high-impact and premium-quality products for its customers, whilst saving 30% on costs by completing embellishments in-house.

Sketches Int director Nizar Alolabi commented, ‘We are proud to be the first UK print business to be using the AccurioShine 3600, which undoubtedly gives us an advantage over our competitors. We have been very pleased with the whole process, from the initial consultation to the easy and straightforward installation and continued ongoing support from the Konica Minolta team.’

Allan Bates, business development manager at Konica Minolta Business Solutions (UK), said, ‘We were convinced that the AccurioShine 3600 would be the perfect solution for Sketches Int, but we are always careful to make sure we match a potential customer with exactly the right solution for their needs and budget. Initially the company supplied us with some test artwork files so we could produce demonstration pieces which were then sent to Nizar and the team to assess. Following that, Nizar visited our showroom in Sutton-in-Ashfield for the first of several hands-on demonstrations of the AccurioShine 3600, to test various substrates and B3 media, which included labels that are kiss cut out once printed and embellished on Intec B3 plotters, along with artwork setup and operators training.’

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