The VarioPrint i-series has been recognised by hundreds of customers as the market-leading solution for printing large volumes of high quality direct mail, transactional communications, marketing collateral, books, magazines and manuals.
The established B3 sheetfed inkjet solution bridges the speed and capacity gap between high-end, toner-based cutsheet printers and entry-level continuous feed inkjet presses. Benefit from higher value work, more business, and less cost.
Launched in August 2015, there are now almost 250 installations of the VarioPrint i-series globally and leading European countries include The Netherlands, UK, France, and Germany respectively. Users are so impressed with the technology that more than 20% of the customer base has invested in an additional device.
Do more in less time
With the VarioPrint i-series, you can increase productivity by printing more than 400,000 A4 images a day and witness unparalleled uptime of more than 90% at twice the speed of similar devices. Michel Bourrienne, President at Ingenidoc (France), document printing logistics and digital services provider, says, “The prime benefit has been increased production speeds for printed books and leaflets. We can now print 300 A4 colour pages per minute, more than double what we could achieve previously. With its superb uptime, the VarioPrint i300 gives us the confidence to take orders until midday and still deliver the following day.”
High quality + High value = Higher margins
Printing ink on sheets of standard offset papers at high speed is enabled by using ColorGrip primer technology. The iQuarius MX inks on the VarioPrint i-series are designed for customers working with offset coated papers for high quality graphic arts applications. We’ve worked closely with our installed base of customers on quality enhancements and added functions over the last year so they can benefit from superior image quality settings with even more colour gamut, smoothness, and deeper blacks.
Quality was a key consideration for Managing Director, Trond Erik Isaksen, at book printer Livonia Print (Latvia). He explains, “We could not tolerate any fundamental compromise on quality. We want customers to be able to choose digital production on equal quality terms with our litho products. We also need absolute consistency between a litho-printed original and a digital reprint, from the offset paper stock to the colour reproduction. We recommend the best production solution for each individual job, based on the parameters of the job, delivery timescales, volume and so on.”
Customers can print a mix of mono and colour on over 1000 tested and approved media, all on one device. Compared with offset, productivity is enhanced by the digital printer’s on-demand capability and the benefits of the ‘white paper’ production model, transforming blank sheets into finished products.
Mathijs Suidman, Director of Media, CB (The Netherlands and Belgium) explains, “Educational publishing has become more and more personalised. With Canon’s digital print technology, our business is ready to handle this emerging trend. We are now seeing increasing requests from educational publishers to personalise content for their market and digital print on-demand makes this possible.”
End-to-end automation
We provide seamless end-to-end, automated workflows to speed up the production process and support customers with any challenges they may have in this area. The VarioPrint i-series links with complex information systems and finishing solutions from third party providers. For example, you can slice finishing times in half with new finishing options for booklet making with perforation and cutting.
Rob Frencken, Managing Director at NHA, one of the top ten training institutes in The Netherlands, has installed the VarioPrint i300 together with Océ COSMOS software to digitally collect and print thousands of course modules per month. Frencken says, “Once a student orders a course, they can count on the package arriving at their home address the next business day. Automated by COSMOS, the course material rolls out of the printer within half an hour. We’re now achieving both a much more effective production process and very high quality at the same time. As a result, we can provide a distinctive customer experience in terms of both logistics and content, which is important for customer satisfaction.”
Peter Wolff, Vice President, Production Printing Products (PPP), EMEA Commercial Printing, Canon Europe, comments, “In the space of four years, it’s clear to see that sheetfed inkjet has gone from being a disruptive technology to enabling measurable improvements for a range of print businesses, from book producers to direct marketing specialists. The VarioPrint i-series is a benchmark within this category for the whole industry. Customers can accelerate ROI by migrating more of their offset volumes to sheetfed inkjet presses, benefiting from reduced waste, lower costs and shorter time to market with on-demand digital print technology. Thanks to the VarioPrint i-series, customers are already pushing the limits of productivity. Inkjet is fundamentally changing the economics of production, transforming blank sheets into profit.”
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