Avantika Printers is one of the leading digital printers in Delhi with prepress, press and postpress — all under the same roof. With a range of printers, cutting and folding machines, sewing and binding machines and other finishing and inserting equipment in a single building, Avantika is able to competitively produce text books, coffee table books, annual reports, brochures, marketing collaterals and many
specialized products for its local and global customers.
In its three-floor setup in the heart of South Delhi, Avantika has installed two Canon 7010 digital presses, a Konika Minolta 6000, and an Océ 6160 and a Canon 1135 for monochrome printing. For a digital printer having finishing and binding in-house seem even more critical than for an offset commercial printer since the turnaround times are small and and the wastages have to be minimal keeping within the zero waste concept of digital print to be profitable.
Having prepress, press and postpress setup under the same roof is a very big advantage for digital printers. In digital printing, you cannot afford to waste even one copy because every print counts. “In offset you can print 1000 copies, afford to waste 200 copies, and if you still take out 5 to 10 bad copies, it does not matter too much.
But in digital, if you are printing 100 coffee table books, and each book costs around Rs. 3000. So even if you waste a single copy, it is a huge loss,” says MN Pandey, director of Avantika Printers. “That is the reason why it is profitable to have a complete postpress setup in- house so that you can take control of the wastage. If you have a remote setup for postpress, damage to books may happen during logistics and transportation, books may get dirty, or the 3-side trimming may not be precise and many other manual process errors may occur. Unlike offset, here you can print one copy, make one copy and then print the next copy. And you will get that one copy as perfect as ten copies. That is the advantage of having the postpress and prepress under one roof.”
“For perfect binding we have
installed two Welbound machines
one is hot melt and open time PUR while the other is nozzle-based,” says Pandey. Apart from these, Avantika has case making machines, nipping, gutter press, cutting and section sewing machines. While the section sewing machine is from Robertson, the cutting machines are from Horizon and Proteck; the gutter press is from Joy Design; folding machines are from Horizon; and the shrink wrap is from Kolbus Germany. “We have more machines like spiral bound, punching machines, creasing machines and die machines,” Pandey says. “We can produce around 500 hard-bound books a day. In the finishing segment we have lamination machines, and for special imprinting we have a screen printing setup.”
Short runs, quality and speed
Speaking about the future of digital printing, Pandey says, “In the print industry, print volume has declined. The size of customer base is increasing, but the job size is going down. These customers, although they have short run jobs, need quick turnaround time and better quality. So digital printing is the best solution for this kind of a demand. With more and more short run jobs in the market, the
future of digital printing is secure.” However Pandey is also optimistic about the future of offset printing. “Both digital and offset complement each other,” he says. “If you have volume jobs, offset is the choice; if you need very high quality, soft tone and more, it is again offset. And if you need really small jobs, quick turnaround time and consistency, then you go for digital. In short, both processes are complementing each other and therefore there is no competition between the two.”
Automation will take over
“Digital printing has changed the printing industry drastically because it meets the need of the hour. People can just buy a single machine and start printing — that is the kind of change it has brought in the last two to three years,” says Pandey. Talking about the future technology and scalability of digital printing, Pandey says that he sees manual processes in digital printing getting eliminated where different machines will talk to each other and everything gets automated — for example, printing folding, gathering and other processes will get done one
after another automatically.
