Johannesburg, 11 Jun 2024
After spending more than 20 years in the printing industry as an employee, Trevor Chetty yearned for a printing operation that he could call his own.
But before he started his own printing company, he wanted to make sure he had the best equipment. Thus, he attended Drupa, the largest printing equipment exhibition in the world, held every four years in Düsseldorf, Germany.
Chetty was attracted to the Konica Minolta brands on display and evaluated these multifunction colour printers against other brands. For him, these machines were unsurpassed for his needs.
After being a printer broker for a few years, he opened New Line Print in 2017. In 2019, he purchased the high-speed AccurioPress C3070 digital press printer with all the features to allow his business to expand into new markets and develop new revenue streams.
“Our emphasis at New Line Print is on providing personalised customer service, with outstanding quality, at affordable prices and quick turnaround time.
“With the solid backing of Konica Minolta, the business began growing in leaps and bounds, and it was time to expand our product offerings,” said Chetty.
He said it was easy for him to become loyal to the Konica Minolta brand because the company had developed a reputation for delivering quality products, maintaining consistency, providing excellent customer service and continually evolving to meet customer expectations.
In 2023, two more Konica Minolta production models were added to New Line Print’s equipment: the AccurioPress C4080 and the bizhub Pro B1100.
Chetty said the AccurioPress C4080 offers the biggest media variety in the market, from thin to thick paper, embossed paper, envelopes and much, much more. The machine can also be used for 50-sheet booklet-making with front trimming and optional creasing, slitting and spine corner forming.
Other features of the AccurioPress C4080 include:
- Perfect binding for books of up to 300 pages.
- 100-sheet stapling with cutting mechanism.
- Automated inline business card and postcard cutting.
- Full bleed banners and posters.
- Inline full bleed trimming with options for creasing, perforation, business cards and long sheets.
“Colour quality issues are outdated as the AccurioPress C4080 includes numerous auto control and adjustment features. Brilliant imaging technology gives stunning consistent colour prints repeatedly.
“Also, the quality is consistent. You can print something today and in six months’ time you will be able to get the exact same quality for a re-order because the machine meticulously stores all the specifications in its memory. In big print runs, there is no loss of definition between the first and the last copy,” said Chetty.
Based on the regular colour calibration, the ease of matching colours on previously printed jobs is so much easier on Konica Minolta products.
The bizhub Pro B1100, a black and white production machine with speed of 100 A4 or 55 A3 pages per minute, was purchased specifically for the high-volume of work that comes to New Line Print from government departments.
Chetty said he receives large orders for government documents with identifiers such as numbers and QR codes to uniquely identify and label each page in a set of documents. The bizhub Pro B1100 is ideally suited to provide such security features on printed material, he said.
Other features of the bizhub Pro B1100 include:
- High print quality with 1 200 x 1 200dpi resolution and LED print head.
- Media weights between 40 and 300gsm (optional 350gsm) in combination with intelligent paper catalogue with mixplex/mixmedia functionality.
- Modular paper feeding and versatile finishing options.
- One-pass duplex scanning ensures processing of up to 180 ipm in colour and black and white.
Chetty said with his family of Konica Minolta printers, his product range includes, but is not limited to, books, brochures, pamphlets, inserts, newspapers, magazines, annual reports, business cards, invites, presentation folders, packaging, posters, vinyl stickers and pull-up banners.
Chetty said more than the technological features that he admired in his printing equipment is the excellent customer service from Konica Minolta.
“Downtime is kept to a minimum. A machine that malfunctions is up and running within four hours. The Konica Minolta technicians are well trained and always willing to help at short notice,” he said, adding he was looking at purchasing one more Konica Minolta machine to print pizza boxes.
Edmund Jacobs, Product Manager for Production Print at Konica Minolta South Africa, said: “Konica Minolta understands the importance of building trusting relationships, fostering collaboration and providing solutions to problems.
“Our new generation of true production systems has been designed to increase the uptime of your press and print more in less time. With the Intelligent Quality Care Unit, you achieve the desired print quality every time, job by job. And their high productivity and versatile automation help you meet today’s demands of short-run production and fast turnaround most efficiently.
“As a division of Bidvest Branded Products, we have more than 70 points of presence across the sub-continent, enabling us to implement our technology-powered, service-focused approach across Southern Africa. We are continuing to drive innovation and creating value for our customers by proposing advanced insights and solutions to their business challenges,” he said.