Futura Digital Color Press in India is the country’s first installer of a Kodak NexPress 2100 digital production colour system. Futura has been active in digital printing for over eight years with two offices in Bangalore serving customers from the corporate account, creative design and commercial printing market segments. In order to increase production capacity and to provide customers with faster turnaround, Futura decided on the NexPress 2100 system, which delivers print productivity and colour consistency on a wide variety of standard offset printing papers.
The selection of the NexPress 2100 system followed a thorough evaluation of various alternatives by Futura Digital Color Press’ managing partners, Shiv Kumar and Harish Kumar.
"We were impressed by the high duty cycle, print quality and particularly the substrate flexibility of NexPress 2100 system, which allows for a wide variety of papers, including textured papers and up to 300 gsm, to print at maximum speed," explains Harish Kumar. "We have a huge demand for card-oriented applications and point-of-sale promotional materials that require heavier stock and the use of textured substrates. The NexPress 2100 system can handle these requirements with absolute ease.”
Kumar says Futura intends to take the strategic position between copy shops and offset printing companies, and to target high-end sector customers who require short run and very high quality printed products. For this type of customer, flexibility is important and it is crucial that jobs are turned around quickly without compromising quality.
Kodak Graphic Communications Group head of graphic solutions and services in India, Kumar Chakravarthy, says Futura also values the ORC (Operator Replaceable Components) feature of the NexPress 2100 system, which allows the operator to carry out maintenance and exchange parts without waiting for a service technician to arrive, thereby minimising downtime and increasing productivity.
“To maintain the pace of growth, Futura had to enhance its capacity and therefore it needed a duty cycle digital colour system that offered high flexibility in terms of substrates as well as reliability,” says Chakravarthy. “We are extremely pleased that Futura has chosen the Kodak NexPress 2100 system. It is expected that this product, with a very high duty cycle per month, will more than double the current monthly capacity of Futura system, in addition to offering the much broader flexibility of printing on varied substrates.”
Chakravarthy was one of the keynote speakers at Kodak’s “NEXt Level in Digital Print” seminar held in India recently.
Other keynote speakers included VP of Digital Print Services GCG Greater Asia Region Peter Foley, and Andrew Cheung, sales manager of Kodak Versamark.
The presentations highlighted innovative applications and their respective vertical markets along with proven case studies through products including Kodak NexPress 2100 digital production colour systems, Digimaster E Series digital production systems and Kodak Versamark high speed inkjet printers.
The seminar was well-attended by many print professionals from the printing industry, who were inspired by the presentations and raised lots of interesting questions about digital printing technology.
