Fosco, Hayes & Hurdley upgrades HP Scitex FB7600 to run orange ink

The new orange ink gives a gamut volume increase of 10%, with a Pantone Colour coverage increase of 6% and corporate colour coverage increase of 7%.

Managing director David Nicholas reported that this upgrade has allowed Fosco's to not only match orange colours with greater accuracy, but "deep burgundies right through to light yellows, light oranges and reds too".

"This is extremely important for our customers who need to match brand colours as closely as possible," he said. "In the past we tried to hit those colours with CYMK and customers would say ‘that's acceptable, we understand you can't get any closer with CYMK' but now we've raised the bar."

He added: "Now work produced on the Scitex matches exactly the work on our Indigo press which has the orange ink, so we can hit brand colours throughout the whole range whether its small format or large format prints."

The orange upgrade is also allowing the company to just generally enhance the vibrancy of prints coming off the FB7600. "We are showing existing customers what we can do now and people are looking at that and are quite amazed. Of course not every job going through the business is orange but the vibrancy is adding to other Pantone colours and images,"," said Nicholas, adding that this offering has also already won the firm new business.

The upgrade has been available worldwide since 1 May and can be applied to the Scitex FB7600 or to Scitex FB7500s that have installed the FB7500 industrial press upgrade kit. This allows two dormant ink beams to be utilised, with a light black ink upgrade also available.

Fosco's is currently in negotiations with HP about adding the light black which, according to HP, creates smoother grey solids and improves neutrality. The company is set on upgrading its other FB7600 to run orange.

Fosco's also benefitted from a speed and quality upgrade as part of this package, enabling the FB7600 to print two and a half times as fast at the same quality.

Installing the new ink was relatively straight forward, reported Nicholas, taking three or four days before the press was back up and running.

He said: "Being the first printer in Europe to offer this was big for us, as it shows how forward-thinking Fosco's is in wanting to be out there in front when it comes to pioneering new technologies."

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