A Story of Investment

In early January 2019, we were running three 3.2m GS Series VUTEk machines for Banners, Rigid Substrates and point of sale things like Roller Banners and Pop-Ups as well as two VUTEk FabriVUs and an MTEX for textile prints and flags.

The GS VUTEks were coming up eight years old, so we knew we would be looking to replace them in the next few years, but they were great workhorses and the quality of work they put out was still very good.

The other factor was that our rigid board was self-adhesive applied. There was a good reason for that: the VUTEks printed at 166 square-metres an hour which was almost twice the speed of a comparable flatbed printer, so it was still quicker to print and apply than it was to print directly. We also found that the print on SAV was better quality than the larger direct-to-board machines at the time.

And then in May 2019 we went to FESPA in Munich where EFI were launching the new VUTEk h5. The h5 was a Hybrid, direct-to-board and roll-to-roll machine that was capable of printing over one hundred 8ft x 4ft sheets in an hour, and with up to 1200dpi, eight colour print (as well as white) and UV-LED curing, the print quality was on another level.

We came away from Germany thinking that machine could be a game changer for us and we made plans to start the purchase process for one early the next year.

Then in 2020 everything changed, and even though we were having money thrown at us from every direction in the form of bounce back loans and covid deferred payment loans, we battened down the hatches and concentrated on diversifying the business into safety signage.

It must have worked, because in the closing months of 2021 without taking any bloody ‘bounceback’ loans, we signed the paperwork for not one but two VUTEk h5s. And they are not cheap, at close to half a million pounds each.

The first one turned up in December 2021, the second in early January 2022. We still use two of our old GS VUTEks to print your banners, because they are bloody good at it, but you’ll notice the difference in your Rigid Boards! The colour gamut on the h5 is spectacular. You don’t get that slight graininess you always had with large-format print and the spectre of reflective banding has been as good as eradicated. 

As with anything, there have been a few hurdles to overcome. For instance, no-one told us we would need a military grade compressor because the h5 generates its own Nitrogen which is silently sprayed onto the substrate to assist with the UV-LED Ink curing process. Subsequently, the first time we fired her up every other machine in the building ran out of air collectively and fell over. Literally.

Another twenty five grand (that we weren’t expecting), including building the compressor its own external housing, sorted that problem out and we were back up and running. The joys of being a printer.

Of course, we’d be happy to provide quotes and samples on any of our materials. Contact us or talk to Mike, Jackie and Phil on our customer service team.

If you would like to come and see the factory, see how your work is produced, we’d be delighted to show you around. In the meantime I am going to try to get some videos together to showcase each part of the production process for each substrate. Watch this space.