Imprimerie Coquand, based in Fontaine, Isère, produces technical leaflets for consumer goods manufacturers. As with other applications, the printing company, which generates sales of around 4 million euros, is seeing growing demand for shorter runs. So, Sylvain Bouteiller, the company's managing director, set out to find a press suited to short-run production, which would be reliable and economical, but without compromising on quality and production speed.
Sylvain Bouteiller opted for a Canon varioPrint 6000 Titan toner press, replacing a Kodak DigiMaster monochrome press that had reached the end of its life. This new machine works in tandem with two other Canon sheet-fed presses, an imagePress C10010VP and an imagePress V700.
With this varioPrint 6000 Titan, a duplex monochrome press capable of 328 pages per minute, Coquand has been able to switch a larger proportion of its offset volumes to digital. The Canon press runs continuously, with no downtime between jobs.
What's more, while the switch to digital is often conditioned by the final rendering, Coquand has found that with this toner press, print quality and double-sided registration precision are equivalent to offset. Coquand uses the same paper for its offset presses as for its Canon digital systems, which simplifies paper stock management and guarantees consistent quality between initial offset-printed runs and reprints. The printer can thus choose the process according to the job to be produced, with no visible difference for the customer between two print runs.
Switching from offset to digital also helps to overcome the problem of recruiting qualified offset operators. Toner press operation is much more intuitive than traditional printing, and operators can be trained quickly.
