Product category:
Printing Companies: General Commercial
News Release from: St Ives Plc
Edited by the Printingtalk Editorial
Team on 05 March 2008
St Ives POS Arm's World First With
Digital Press
SP Group, a UK point-of-sale (POS) and retail print service provider has been using what is claimed to be the world's first Inca Onset digital press to produce personalised wide-format print.
SP, which is part of St Ives, is printing on the Onset at speeds of up to 500 square metres per hour and according to SP, with comparable quality to traditional screen print The machine is at SP Group's Redditch headquarters and it was fully operational after 10 weeks of testing and training
This article was originally published on Printingtalk on 31 May 2004 at 8.00am (UK)
Related stories
Stitching Up Speedy And Flexible Finishing
St Ives Peterborough is to install a new Ferag high speed stitching system.
Online Document Management For Financial Sector
St Ives Burrups, which provides document services for the financial market, has launched a product to help clients streamline the creation and management of fund documents.
The Inca Onset is running over three shifts, seven days-a-week.
The Inca Onset is being used to service SP's clients,, such as Arno GB, luxury lingerie manufacturer La Senza, home retailer Habitat and chocolate retailer Thorntons.
According to SP, the personalisation capabilities of the Inca Onset open new opportunities in the wide format POS market because print can be cost effectively customised to reflect regional dialects and marketing can be localised to each store without compromising on job turn-around times.
Further reading
St Ives' Key Role In 2012 Olympic Bid Win
The London 2012 Olympic bid documents, which played a key role in helping the city's bid team to its success, were the work of St Ives Westerham Press.
Adare Halycon Improves Quality and Green Managemen
Adare Halcyon has secured the ISO 14001 Environmental Management Standard and has also just upgraded its quality management system to comply with the new ISO 9001:2000.
Bezier Beats The Rest To Retain ASDA Account
Retail media producer Bezier, has retained the prestigious point of purchase (POP) account for one of Britain's leading retailers, ASDA.
The press provides the ability to print on to almost any substrate up to 10mm thick and a maximum size of 3.2 metres x 1.5 metres, said the company.
The system's drying process and colour gamut makes images look brighter and more vivid, which enables brand managers to obtain a closer colour match across multiple print processes.
SP Group said it has been offering small format, localised digital POS and ticketing to the retail market for several years.
Simon Ward, managing director of UK sales at St Ives, commented: "The new Inca Onset press undeniably takes large format digital print to another level.
The quality, speed and most importantly for our customers the personalisation ability of the Onset, makes it, in our eyes, the worlds first digital screen press." Jeremy Jones, the group operations director at SP Group, added: "Our market is driven by the need for short-run, quick turn-around POS that enables retailers to regularly change displays and promotions.
By installing the Inca Onset we can respond to market demands as the press's unique features help our customers keep one step ahead of competition." He explained: "One job we produced for a high street retailer involved printing on to foamex.
The substrate was too thick to run through a litho press but we were able to put it on the Onset and print direct.
Another benefit is that we are now able to isolate individual areas within a file and change the colour gamut without it affecting the entire print, which in itself is a significant breakthrough from which our customers can really benefit." And he continued: "Due to our high volume of print we are really pushing the Onset technology that Inca has developed.
There is no doubt that the Onset is a very exciting large format digital press and we are working with Inca to maximise its output capacity and fully explore the benefits of this technology." SP Group, which now includes digital large format firm Service Graphics, has 1,200 employees at 13 sites across the UK.
In addition to its Inca Onset, it runs amongst other systems, two Inca Columbia Turbo presses and two Inca Spyder presses.
The group has an annual turnover pf GBP130 million.
• St Ives Plc: contact details and other news
• Email this article to a colleague
• Register for the free Printingtalk email newsletter
• Printingtalk Home Page
Search the Pro-Talk network of sites
