Konica Minolta South Africa printed marketing material for the Childhood Cancer Foundation South Africa (CHOC) on its award-winning, durable and reliable bizhub presses during its production hour, which took place each day at the Africa Print Expo and which showcased its full production line of digital equipment printing material from start to finish to very good use.
The company produced high quality printed material for CHOC Childhood Cancer Foundation South Africa over the three days of the show, ultimately delivering 1920 brochures (A3 double sided – 200gsm gloss), 11520 DL flyers (double sided – 170gsm gloss), 1,840 posters (A3 – 170gsm gloss), 18000 business cards (300gsm matt) and 4,500 letterheads (trimmed to A4 – 80gsm Bond) to the foundation on the final day.
KMSA also printed 3125 black and white booklets on 12500 sheets on the brand new B951 and B1250 machines for the Dullstroom Bird of Prey & Rehabilitation Centre and the Rotary Club of Knights Pendragon, which is raising funds for the National Sea Rescue Institute. In total, the company printed more than 37000 A4 images during its production hour at the Expo.
Leon Minnie, product manager: production systems at Konica Minolta South Africa, said, Our mission at this year’s Africa Print Expo was not just to distribute ‘pretty pictures’, as this results in a huge amount of wastage and, as general practice at these shows, provides print clients with very little information of the machine’s real ability and true quality. We decided rather to find an alternative method to demonstrate our quality of equipment, while also using it for a worthy cause and, providing the type of material that could be used by the organisation well into the future. CHOC was in great need of marketing collateral, and we felt that this would be a very valuable project with which to assist. By publicly demonstrating our complete belief in our products, this idea also highlighted that Konica Minolta South Africa is committed to both innovation and the requirements of the printing industry.
All products produced for CHOC were printed, trimmed, creased, folded and wrapped and underwent the entire print process – from submission, workflow, calibration and colour management, printing on multiple devices and even using off-line/near-line finishing – with great success.
“Through using these finishing processes, we showed that digital printing can be successfully creased, folded and trimmed without cracking, providing printers with a high quality finished product. We received the artwork from CHOC, which was supplied in PDF and Illustrator formats. We used imposition software to create templates for the business cards, DL flyers and letterheads, which were then set up according to the finishing machinery from Ipex Machinery – a Morgana Digi Fold Pro (creaser and folder) and Morgana Card Plus business card cutter with two different blade sets to accommodate not only business cards but the DL flyers as well. Ipex Machinery also used a programmable guillotine machine to trim the letterheads, posters and brochures with ease and efficiency, said Minnie.
All of the colour machines were calibrated and FOGRA certified to maintain colour consistency during the three days and to verify if any colour fluctuation had taken place during the show and to what degree. This is because the environment at the show is far from ideal and solutions like this can minimise time correcting colour and wastage. With our colour management solution, colour consistency day to day and month to month is possible, taking the guess work out of colour manipulation and correction. It is also possible to obtain uniformed colour across different printing processes, from wide format to digital and even litho. We are happy to report that all of the machines were consistent in productivity and colour, both during the runs and day after day.
Desré Murray, CHOC business development manager, said that a contribution of this nature is significant and adds immeasurable value to an organisation like CHOC. Konica Minolta South Africa’s generous contribution was very well timed, as we had run out of our brochures and did not have the budget to have them printed. CHOC is very grateful for this donation and believe that the high quality prints will serve us well far into the future.
