Mercury Print Adds First Indigo W7200
Rochester, NY printer ran 1.5 million impressions last week; DigiPrime precoats both sides of HP's newest digital web printing press
By Hal Hinderliter, Workflow Editor
Mercury Print Products has installed the first HP Indigo W7200, a new twin-engine dual-side high-speed web-fed digital press that will debut at PRINT 09. The Rochester, NY commercial printer has incorporated a DigiPrime precoating unit into the press. Introduced at drupa, it assures toner adherence to any type of paper.
"It allows us to use any kind of substrate that's currently available," says Dean McDonough, pressroom manager for Mercury Print Productions. "We know that we're going to get good toner adhesion and
that we're going to have a good quality product for our end customer. On occasion, we have had web houses give us their stock and we don't have the luxury of sending it out to a mill to have it DigiPrime coated for the press, so the inline primer assures us of a durable product, and the cost of the coating is so low that it's insignificant."
Installed at Mercury for just a few weeks, the W7200 ran 1.5 million impressions last week alone. The company also has other digital presses, both Indigo and iGen models.
The Indigo W7200 double-engine web press has a larger image area, allowing prints of 12.5 wide by almost 39 inches long. During a media preview of the W7200 at Mercury this week, HP reported it has sold 5,000 Indigo presses since the first model was launched by its inventor Benny Landa. His firm was later acquired by HP. Altogether Indigo presses have recorded an estimated 10 billion printed pages.
HP says its latest Indigo 7000 sheetfed press has an installed base of 230 units in 23 countries. Consolidated Graphics, Dallas, is its biggest Indigo customer, with 32 units operating. The monthly record for an Indigo-based production operation was 8.8 million impressions at one customer site; the largest project run was 125,000 letter-sized pages.
Another HP Indigo web model is the WS6000, with just over 40 units installed in 16 countries. The longest job done on a WS6000 was 41,000 linear meters of 253,000 impressions. Proctor and Gamble is encouraging its print service providers to buy WS6000s for its work.
The W 7200 runs 97 meters per minute when running four-color duplex, running faster for fewer colors per page, slowing for 5, 6 or 7 colors. It is targeted to books, transpromotional work and direct mail. A VDP upgrade is coming next year to enable photobook-quality output at 240 pages per minute for color, or almost 1,000 ppm for monochrome.
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