The print market in the far northern Mumbai suburb of Dahisar is not as big and developed as that in Andheri East or Lower Parel. Print service providers there have to expend extra effort to attract bulk and corporate customers. That effort could be in the shape of aggressive field marketing or getting superior technology or a combination of the two. Classic Books, located on the busy thoroughfare of SV Road in Dahisar, following this philosophy has invested in a Ricoh 7100 4-color digital production printing press along with a Duplo DC-616 PRO slitter, cutter, creaser.
“I feel we are late by a few years in upgrading our technology, especially in our finishing section. Classic Books could have established itself as a premier print house in the Dahisar area if we had brought in the Duplo a few years ago. However, with these new investments we hope we will now take a big leap,” says Pragnesh Nisar, owner of Classic Books and Alpha Digital which are across the road from each other. Altogether the company has three units in Dahisar.
Alpha was earlier using an entrylevel digital press from Konica Minolta and a manual cutting machine from Ideal. Both the Konica Minolta and Ideal will continue working alongside the two new pieces of machinery. For the wide format signage segment Alpha uses a Roland inkjet printer.
According to Nisar, getting in the Duplo DC-616 has led to significant savings in manual labour and improvement in the quality of finishing. The work that would earlier take 50 minutes now takes just about 10 to 15 minutes and the finishing consistency has improved. “This has been a big selling point for us,” says Nisar.
Duplo being a finishing solution for the short-run, on-demand digital printer, is designed to remove white borders and prevent toner cracking on digital color documents. It can process up to six slits, 25 cuts, and 20 creases in a single pass. It can finish a wide array of digital products including greeting cards, invitations, brochures, book covers, photos, and 24-up business cards without adding any modules. The DC-616 PRO comes standard with its PC Controller software for easy job setup via a PC as well as the CCD scanner. The DC-616 PRO also comes along with a perforation unit.
Nisar has bigger plans. Since 40 to 50% of the business consists of offset work, which Classic Books outsources to a third-party, Nisar believes it would make sense to set up an in-house offset press as well. “This investment will happen but only after a year because we need a much bigger space.”
Andheri printer buys its first production printer Ricoh 5100
Print Plant, based in Andheri East, bought its first digital color production printing machine in March this year. The new Ricoh 5100 now runs alongside two earlier digital presses from Xerox and Konica Minolta. Print Plant has also moved into a bigger space which is in the middle of the commercial district of Andheri East.
“Earlier we had basic digital printers and a basic black and white offset printing machine. In addition to a rise in volumes, our digital customers were also asking for more sophisticated printing work to be done. We were outsourcing our high volume and complex work to a thirdparty and so we thought, why not get a production printer in-house. With the new machine we also moved into a bigger space which is in close proximity to some big business parks,” says Devraj Ravariya, a partner in the firm.
It made sense to move to such a prime location because Print Plant has mainly been dealing with corporate customers from the pharmaceutical, real estate and advertising industries. Apart from digital and offset printing equipment, it also has wide format inkjet signage printers – an HP 795 and an HP 5400 wide format printer as well as a Xerox black and white wide format printer.
