The opportunity to provide extra security by bringing sensitive printing work in-house has seen the Liberal Party of Australia’s Victorian Division to become among the first in Australia to purchase the new Konica Minolta 8050 digital colour imaging system. With the Liberal Party gearing up for a Federal Election towards the end of this year, the Victorian Division felt the time was right to gain greater control over its quality colour and B&W print production.
Complete flexibility over the print production process, far greater cost-effectiveness compared with third-party print charges, and the ability to turn jobs around so much faster were also aspects of the solution that captured Ray Hennessey, Victorian Division in-house designer attention.
According to Hennessey, the quality of all output on the KM8050 has been "spot on" from day one, and there had been no teething issues involved in bringing the networked KM8050 online.
"We had been sending a lot of small-run work out to third-party printers, but we felt far more comfortable knowing that we could now work to our, often tight, time frames, and sensitive material could never be compromised ahead of launches or events if we controlled the process in-house," Hennessey says.
"And because our print volumes are growing rapidly – for both the 35 Victorian Federal seats and the 80-odd State seats – we wanted the flexibility of knowing we could print material on demand and change it on the spot if necessary. It has helped avoid the print scheduling problems that often occurred when we sent work out to external printers."
Hennessey says he is also impressed with the system’s ability to produce high quality monochrome and colour output, accurate colour reproduction, and the automatic colour recalibration after every 100,000 copies.
Tony McKenna, Victorian Division financial controller, says he is delighted with the savings being generated through the KM8050.
"Our older inkjet-based printing technology was costing us up to $2 per A3 colour page. The KM8050 allows us to trim this cost to about 12c per A3 page, with the added benefit of far superior results," McKenna says.
