中文Sometimes the best investments are the ones you weren’t planning to make yet.
Hickling & Squires — a Nottinghamshire-based commercial printer with a turnover of roughly £5.5m and 37 employees — just installed the UK’s first Konica Minolta AccurioJet 30000. It’s a B2 inkjet press that cost £800,000. And according to production director Jamie Gilbert, they originally thought this kind of upgrade wouldn’t happen for another three years.
What changed? “The deal that Konica put to us was a deal that you wouldn’t refuse,” Gilbert said simply.
That’s the kind of offer that makes you reconsider your entire timeline. And for Hickling & Squires, it’s already paying off.
The AccurioJet 30000 fills a gap that many printers know well but struggle to address — what Gilbert calls “in-between work.” It’s the jobs that don’t quite fit litho (too short a run, too variable) and don’t quite fit smaller digital toner devices (not enough quality, not enough substrate range). B2 inkjet sits right in that sweet spot.
The results have been immediate. Since the press went live in May, Hickling & Squires has picked up new jobs they “wouldn’t ordinarily get.” Gilbert says it “has given us that new opening to new things that we’ve never been able to do before.” The press handles a wider range of substrates — including plastics and fabrics — and delivers consistent quality at speeds that make short-run and mid-volume work genuinely profitable.
But the story isn’t just about the press itself. It’s about what a printer has to do to make room for it.
Hickling & Squires built a dedicated 9x16m climate-controlled production room in just five weeks. Complete with air conditioning, humidity management, and a separate power room — “all the electrics redone for the machine,” Gilbert explained. Two older litho presses were retired and replaced with a secondhand Heidelberg in March. The AccurioJet now sits between litho and digital production, creating a three-tier workflow that covers every run length.
It’s a classic example of what Konica Minolta’s Mark Bladon described as the technology’s real value: “Jamie and the team needed to upgrade the litho equipment, but instead of simply replacing like-for-like, he recognised that a lot of his short-run work needed litho-level quality but with more flexibility. The AccurioJet 30000 delivers exactly that.”
The lesson here isn’t about one press or one printer. It’s about timing. When technology reaches a point where it genuinely bridges a gap you’ve been living with — and the commercial offer makes it accessible — waiting three years might mean watching your competitors fill that gap first.
Hickling & Squires didn’t wait. And now they’re doing work they couldn’t do before. That’s the simplest measure of whether an investment was worth it.
Source: Printweek — https://www.printweek.com/content/news/hickling-squires-installs-uk-first-accuriojet-30000
