Based in South Mumbai’s Fort business and commercial district, Modern Copy Centre has been working for the city’s business customers since 1986. Having evolved into a digital print service provider many years ago, it recently commissioned a brand-new digital color production press, the Canon imagePress C910. The new digital color press was supplied by Mumbai-based Edifice Technologies, the Canon production printer distributor for the Mumbai region.
“We had been in discussion with Canon since the start of 2019. However, the Covid-19 lockdown delayed our plans. After the easing of the lockdown, we saw two press demonstrations, one at an existing customer at Dadar and the other one here in the Fort area itself. We were impressed by the press and finally pulled the trigger,” says Kaushal Nandu, owner of Modern Copy Centre.
Modern Copy Centre provides all types of digital print services to both retail as well as corporate clients. It also works with and supplies prints to many local graphic designers. Nandu has been using the imagePress C910 since 23 October and is very satisfied with its results. “We are pretty happy with the press. It is very stable. I would want to emphasize that this press is for print service providers who value quality,” he says.
The imagePress C910 has a rated speed of 90 pages per minute and handles media up to 350 gsm. There is a choice of digital front end solutions to drive it productively for full-color production at a combined resolution of 2,400 dpi. These solutions include Canon’s own PRISMAsync Print Server Version 7 and the EFI Fiery powered imagePRESS Servers.
Print volume recovery still slow
The national lockdown that was announced in March 2019 to stop the spread of Coronavirus has hit Modern Copy Centre’s volumes and commercial and digital printing in general. Although print demand has improved gradually in the last few months after the un-lockdowns that started in end-May, page volumes even in December 2019 are still only 40% of what they were at the start of the year.
“Yes, business has slowed down sharply. Almost 95% of our corporate clients in the Fort area have most of their employees working from home. Their demand for print is practically zero, even today. However, in recent months we have seen that many of the long-run offset jobs are moving to digital. The shortening of run lengths is happening because of the slowdown in business activities,” Nandu says.
Nandu expects a full recovery in print volumes only when vaccination starts. “People are still hesitant to move out, and most of the offices are operating with most of their staff working remotely. Also, Mumbai’s local trains are still not open to the general public. All these factors are still do not favor the full recovery of print volumes,” he argues.
