UK’s first colour Prosper goes live at Howard Hunt Group

Posted by on 21/12/2011

Written by Simon Eccles, Whitmar Publications

Last month was particularly satisfying for Howard Hunt Group. Not only did it win Digital Printer’s Supreme Award (see page 55 of Issue 43, December 2011 or click here to view online magazine), but it started offering the UK’s first Kodak Prosper Press 5000XL web fed inkjet colour press for live jobs.

The company has been running up the Prosper Press for the past eight months and now it’s ready for the next stage. ‘We are speaking with all our clients now with a view to producing some live work on the Prosper as we feel the time is right to put the machine to the test in terms of production,’ said production director Keith Whitehead.

The direct mail and data services specialist has long experience of digital printing, with a battery of Scitex (now Kodak) 4.5 inch inkjet heads fitted to Scheffer finishing lines, plus Kodak Versamark inkjets, a couple of Xeikon 8000 web fed toner presses (used for the award winning job), and a Kodak NexPress 2500 sheetfed colour toner press.

What the Prosper Press opens up is the prospect of ‘white paper’ production: fully variable colour print at high speed, with quality that’s said to match offset. It takes webs up to 648 mm wide in 45 to 300 g/m2 weights for 8, 12 or 16 page sections. It runs at 200 metres per minute, equivalent to 3600 A4 pages, with a duty cycle of up to 90 million pages per month.

Prosper 5000XL Press Vital Statistics

Speed: up to 200 metres per minute

Quality: 175 lpi equivalent

Max web width: 648 mm

Substrates: 45 to 300 g/m2 uncoated and matt coated

Dimensions: 22.9 x 7.6 x 2.6 metres

Howard Hunt Group was originally founded in 1990 as a City printer on the Old Kent Road in south London. Today it has a £60 million turnover. It moved to its present location in [Crossways Business Park] Dartford on the Thames estuary in 1998 and started direct mail operations. ‘We developed this to become experts in the market,’ said Lucy Edwards, deputy managing director at Howard Hunt Group. ‘It was a good core, but we felt we had to add more services.’

The result was the launch of Celerity [Information Services], a data services company within the group that specialises in database work. It is now introducing a company-wide platform called Connector, to handle all aspects of data, including analysis, segmentation, market automation and channel preferences, with output to the likes of SMS, e-mail, social media and of course printing.

Ms Edwards is excited about the new system’s potential. ‘Prosper is a revelation, a big step change,’ she said. ‘It gives us litho quality and speed, with digital complexity. Put those all together and it is a big step forward. The time out of the door is remarkable. Previously direct mail was largely limited to personalisation of names and addresses. Now we can have 100% variability. Litho has quality and speed, but not response. Prosper has speed, quality, response and variability.’

She says that the combination of Connector with the Prosper’s ‘white paper’ ability speeds up response times enormously: ‘It can be created, printed and out the same day. This way, direct mail is almost as immediate as an online campaign. This is not just time-saving, it allows integrated campaigns. Personalised direct mail can be very effective as it talks directly to the reader. If integrated with online elements it can drive recipients to the web and then to online purchase.

‘It can also work the other way, so online response can trigger information capture that can then be used to generate personalised print as a follow up. Connector frees up marketing people to think about campaigns, not messing about with production, file formats etc, as this is now all automated.’

‘We started investigating high speed variable data printing about four years ago,’ said Mr Whitehead. ‘We signed for the Prosper 5000XL a year ago. We already had the two Xeikon 8000s and the NexPress 2500, so it was a natural progression for us into high speed fully variable printing.’ He said that the HP T300 was also considered, but ‘in our opinion the Kodak quality was a lot better’.

The press remains a beta test unit. ‘The beta test will end when both Kodak and Howard Hunt Group agree that the machine is now fit for purpose in terms of substrates that can be used and the uptime meets the agreed criteria,’ Mr Whitehead said. The list price is about £2.7 million, although a purchase decision would also entail new infrastructure as well as ordering dedicated finishing equipment...

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