Opened on 30 June 2013, Konica Minolta’s demonstration centre in one of Gurgaon’s Cybercity towers is fairly spacious.
Housing the company’s current digital printer products including the multifunction office printers and the color and monochrome production machines used for short run and variable print, the centre is used for training technical personnel and for demonstrations to existing and potential customers.
Since the centre contains several RIPS such as the EFI Fiery and Kodak’s Prinergy apart from Konica Minolta’s own IC601 RIP to drive the production presses, many visitors to the demo centre spend considerable time testing these as well as evaluating the entire range of presses that they are interested in.
Konica Minolta has had great success since it set up its Indian company in August 2012 to actively support its digital press marketing and its distributors – Monotech India, KMI and HCL – with TechNova added about a year ago.
With its robust BizHub 6000 series, and the faster BizHub 7000 it has dominated the Indian entry-level colour production market and within the next couple of months, it should reach an installed base of 2000 digital presses in the country.
Extensive discussion with V Balakarishnan the executive general manager who looks after marketing and sales and Manish Gupta the PP product and marketing manager makes one realize that Konica Minolta India is relentless in listening to its existing and potential customers.
In addition, the company is constantly strengthening its distributors on whom it relies for sales, installation and maintenance which includes the replacement of various parts and the toners.
The Konica Minolta digital presses are designed and built for very specific target markets and their robust performance generally means that the overall experience of owning and using one cannot be easily beaten in terms of quality and cost efficiency in that segment.
For instance, while the 6000 and its faster successor the Bizhub 7000 are the workhorse products for a large part of the market, the upgrade path is clear for those who want to use thicker substrates for better quality and a higher duty cycle.
The Konica Minolta C8000 digital press delivers higher quality and is useful for digital printers who have grown to the level where they can generate much higher volumes.
The C8000 has a vacuum-based feeder that can handle substrates up to 350 gsm and it has a second fusing unit and a humidifier unit to cure the special HD inks developed for this machine and to keep the substrates from curling.
The color quality on this press is maintained by real real-time color density adjustments using density control sensors that read patches of CMYK, which are created between the images, providing on-the- fly instant feedback control during continuous printing.
The maximum densities and half-tone densities are adjusted automatically to achieve image stability without affecting performance.
In-built color standardization
The C8000 is capable of being closely calibrated, even to G7 standards although to do this and maintain this level of printing on calibrated substrates within strict tolerance requires the press to be maintained well and to run in clean and stable conditions.
We have written earlier about Konica Minolta’s inbuilt color standardization technologies in its machines and in the C8000 automatic correction maintains stable image quality.
The gradation correction function on this press meets the varied characteristics of output papers with the possibility of detailed gradation corrections according to the type of paper used.
This is done by printing test charts which are read by the built- in color density sensor built into the machines relay unit to set up gradation correction values for as many as 15 paper categories, including, coated, plain, and high quality papers.
The C8000 press has been a hit worldwide since it was introduced in 2010. In the United States it has already exceeded a thousand installs. Introduced in India during the Printpack 2011 exhibition, Indian installs have passed 150 and are headed for 200 in the next couple of months which makes it one of the strong markets for this machine worldwide.
