Africa Print RoadShow welcomed by Cape Town

The Africa Print RoadShow, a commercial and digital print exhibition sponsored by Xerox, was held in Cape Town on 21 and 22 June, at the International Convention Centre. The road show, which has already visited Nelspruit, Durban and Bloemfontein, was the fourth to be held this year, and gives industry professionals an opportunity to view a cross-section of products and services on display and in action.

The event showcases the entire digital print process, featuring everything from sheeted A3 machines to large format digital equipment, and includes both suppliers and manufacturers of commercial and digital printers, finishing equipment, software, media and consumables.

“The show attracted more than 1 400 visitors from the Western Cape,” says Paul Haglich, marketing manager of the production systems group in the Xerox division at Bytes Document Solutions. “Exhibitors made several good sales leads on the day, and it provided an excellent occasion for people to investigate business opportunities and learn about new solutions which they can use to grow or improve their business.”

The Xerox stand attracted a large number of visitors and was awarded second prize for the best large stand. The highlights of the show were the hugely productive Xerox 550, Xerox 1000 and the Xerox 700i. “Customers are constantly impressed by the quality and speed of these machines,” says Haglich. “The show was a huge success for Xerox and several major leads were generated. As usual, the Xerox 1000 turned out to be a showstopper. Our Silverline Lab Web2Print and Variable Data solutions demonstrated live at the show also attracted many visitors who were impressed by the business growth potential that this 'cloud-based' solution offers.

The Xerox 1000 press uses environmentally friendly dry ink, which delivers sharp, rich, digitally mastered image quality to enhance efficiency and productivity on a wide range of media. The press prints at 2 400 x 2 400 dpi for sharpness and uniformity. It delivers outstanding mid-tones, crisp text, pure neutrals, detailed shadows and bright highlights, and excellent photo rendering, for speciality photo applications. The press maintains colour consistency, from page-to-page and job-to-job.

The Xerox colour 550, with volumes of between 10 000 and 50 000 pages per month, is an affordable digital colour print solution for any environment, and is scalable to grow with a business. It allows companies to keep high-value colour printing in-house, and protects sensitive data with security features that conform to standards and regulations. Users can capture, edit, manage and store documents with optional workflow solutions.

With full-colour print or copy speeds of up to 70 pages per minute, the Xerox 700i offers exceptional image quality with the highest resolution available. It produces smooth colour sweeps, sharp, high-resolution photographs, crisp, clean text, outstanding gradients and fine detail. Users can expand their applications to include coated brochures, newsletters, presentations, direct mail, manuals, and more by adding finishing capabilities that include stacking, multi-position stapling and hole punching, saddle-stitch booklet making, sorting, collating, face-trimming, and folding.

The international exhibition is in Johannesburg from 22 to 24 August 2012. Last year's expo in the city attracted more than 6 300 visitors, making it the best attended show to date.