Sonal Xerox, a digital printing pioneer in Gujarat, recently installed a Ricoh Pro C651EX at its new plant at Prahladnagar in Ahmedabad. In its four existing plants the company already has a comprehensive portfolio of digital printing equipment that make them one-stop solution providers for all the printing needs in their respective areas.
The Prahladnagar plant of Sonal Xerox was set up three months ago and operations commenced using this new digital press from Ricoh. The company is a pioneer of laser printing technology in Gujarat since 1985, when it introduced large format printing in the state along with analogue printing machines, which was a first time concept.
Sonal Xerox proprietor Rakesh Surani speaking about the new digital press says, “The Ricoh Pro C651EX is a user-friendly machine which has an inbuilt mechanism which accepts
magnetic paper and can directly print on any metallic medium. It also has a liquid coolant technology that cools the machine from within, thereby
eliminating the need for any external cooling.” A user of several Ricoh, Konica Minolta and Canon digital presses over the years, Sonal finds a high level of consistency in the Ricoh machines from the first to the last
print of any print run. Apart from the low variation throughout the run, these presses with the advanced image processing technology produce high image quality and definition nearly equal to offset.
With customers demanding a personalization in every print project, digital printing offers interesting options especially for short run requirements. “The market is moving
towards digital printing fast. The current crop of digital presses offer quality equivalent to offset and there are substantial cost benefits. Offset printing is suited for long print runs of uniform characteristics. However, if a customer wants to have minor variations or variable data or images in the same product, he will have to resort to digital printing,” says Surani.
The commercial printing industry in Gujarat is witnessing a positive
change in terms of higher demand and a corresponding increase in the number of quality printers. “Five years ago, only five to ten new offset presses were being bought by printers in the state each year. This has improved in the last half decade where around 20 to 25 new presses are being installed in a year, which proves the rise in demand for specialized printing in
Gujarat,” according to Surani.
