The company, which was shortlisted for the PrintWeek India Awards 2015 in the Magazine Printer of the Year category, which also boasts to have the country’s first Heidelberg SX74 five-colour offset press, recently invested in a Ricoh Pro 8100s, a black and white production printer, to offer variable data printing services to its corporate clients.

Then someone approached Amol Deshpande of Amol Associates to reprint an out of print book published in 1938, which was already in tatters. Deshpande reprinted the book, page by page, on the Ricoh machine, which allows simultaneous scan and print facility, without having to go through the entire pre-press process.

This was the beginning. Since then, the company has found a niche in printing such rare books in short-run digital process. As we visited the shop floor located at Hingne Khurd in Pune, Deshpande showed us a rare copy of Sant Dnyaneshwar’s Dnyaneshwari, which he is reprinting for a client.

“We used to get requests for variable printing, ranging from barcodes to QR codes, from our corporate clients. To meet the requirements, two years back we started out with refurbished machines. We used to get small orders then. When we started growing, we added the Ricoh Pro 8100s in August 2015,” said Deshpande.

The single-colour Ricoh Pro 8100s offers user-friendly features, from an easy to use control panel to an intuitive paper library for broad media support. It has a print resolution of 1200 x 4800 dpi via VCSEL and the output speed is 95 ppm. The total standard capacity is 3,300 and the maximum capacity is 8,850 sheets.

Now, more and more publishers are approaching him for short-run book reprints. “In offset, if you are printing a book, you need to print more than 1,000 copies. In digital, you can print any number of copies. It saves the inventory cost. The print on demand model works very well in digital. If you need more copies, you just print more copies and supply it to the customers, without having to worry about storage,” Deshpande explained. This, and the fact that the company offers the possibility to recreate an old, out of print book as brand new, has worked wonders. Also, Pune being an education hub, there is a demand for specialised book printing.   

Despande agreed that these are all short-run jobs, yes, but the volume of business coming through short-run jobs is vast. Talking about cost, he said the cost in digital printing comes in colours, not in black and white. When it comes to colour printing, on the other hand, Deshpande trusts his Heidelberg machine.

Deshpande has the last word on the ongoing debate between offset and digital. “The offset colour market is growing while offset mono market is shrinking. The opposite of these are true in case of digital,” he said.

At the same time, as Pune grows into a manufacturing hub and a real estate haven, the city has seen a considerable number of colour digital press installations. Most of these cater to the commercial market segments like real estate brochures. “The colour digital is a premium segment,” said Deshpande. “There is less volume and more margins. On the other hand, B&W digital printing has more volume and it is profit making.”

And why Ricoh? Deshpande said the first thing that drew him to Ricoh was its services. It seems in Pune, Ricoh has found a perfect ecosystem. According to a company official, Ricoh has 80% of the market share in the city.

A first generation printer, and a diploma holder in print technology, Deshpande dabbled into advertising a bit before starting as a commercial printer in 1996, with a Swift 1520 single colour machine. “Since I was advertising, I started getting jobs from artists and companies directly. Later, we targeted the corporates and slowly we grew,” he said.

In 2005, the company acquired its first four-colour machine, a refurbished Akiyama. By 2010, the company had three four-colour Akiyamas. In 2013, the company acquired the Heidelberg SX74 five-colour, which came with the full range of pre-press equipment. “So far as the technologies go, we are top of the line. We have a strong pre-press and press facility,” said Deshpande.

Next in the agenda is to add more finishing capabilities. For this Deshpande is planning a trip to Drupa the next year.