AS A 10-YEAR OLD PETER RIVETT WAS already playing with print, composing his own jobs for printing on a 6 x 4 inch Adana. Fifty years later he retains all that youthful enthusiasm, though the machines he is playing with today are rather more sophisticated than a tabletop platen. He is chairman of Real Digital, arguably the single most innovative printer in the UK; one that in the three years it has been in business has grown to a turnover of more than £10 million. And none of it comes from offset litho.

Rivett is joined by managing director David Laybourne and sales director Andy Ruddle. Ruddle and Rivett set up Real Digital three years ago; Laybourne joined more recently, or rather rejoined is more accurate as all three had previously combined to operate Olwen Direct, located just a half a mile from the Real Digital plant in Croydon. After Olwen was sold in 1997, Rivett took his money and moved to Australia, running a marine engineering business. The call of print was too strong, however.

Getting back with Ruddle they discussed what the print business of the future might look like – and set about creating it. Rivett says: “I had identified that there was a huge opportunity in the market for a solution that wasn’t being addressed, or at least wasn’t being addressed fast enough. Because we had the cash we could move quickly.”

That opportunity lay in volume personalised printing, and pushing into transpromo markets. Here the ability to handle huge amounts of data is vital, but a significant barrier was that the digital print engines available were not fast enough. Colour from cutsheet digital presses pointed to the possibility of quality colour. But those print engines that were fast enough were either black-only or could not produce acceptable-quality colour. Rivett’s response was to build his own.

“I had identified a long time ago that the future lay in inkjet because it is a scaleable technology, which other digital technologies are not,” he says.

He considered having an imaging system built to his specification, but instead came across a single-pass inkjet machine which was printing wall coverings. At about the same time Agfa acquired the technology which has become the Dotrix. Real Digital’s take on the inkjet press is somewhat different from Agfa’s, most notably in being painted grey. But there are other fundamental differences needed to achieve Rivett’s dream. There are two RD presses, both painted in the neutral colour, with the space and services in place for several more. When Rivett and Ruddle put together the plans for Real Digital, nothing was left to chance.

To carry out the grand design, the conversion of the warehouse-type factory was managed entirely by the directors. Any outside contractors were brought in and controlled from a Portakabin in the car park. Ordinary doors were replaced by steel-reinforced doors; a dual electricity supply from substations in different directions was laid on; a highly sensitive sniffer-style fire alarm was specified and a biometric lock system was fitted throughout. There are 58 of them so it can seem as if you walk just a few yards before pressing a finger on a pad to open another door. They even guard the canteen and the staff gym, making sure people are in the places they should be. The air conditioning system came from Sweden because it has smaller blower holes to produce an even airflow. The air itself is recycled. But control of the environment goes further than this, with humidity and temperature managed to get the best from the inkjet machines, the five iGen3 and other Xerox machines, and the eight Buhrs inserting lines. The whole inkjet room is positively pressured, and air is blown in gently at parts of the press line to balance out extractor systems. “Contamination is the biggest problem with inkjet,” Rivett says.

His long research and experience of print technologies focused everything on uv inkjet as the technology for the future.

Every aspect of the RD press follows on from this philosophy: there is a Meech vacuum unit immediately the reel or paper is unwound; a corona treatment station boosts the energy level of the paper before it goes into the first print unit; the web path takes it to the back of the press and runs it backwards through the inkjet heads. After printing under the array of four colour bars, each with nine inkjet heads, the web is dried by two uv lamps, each bathed in nitrogen that is generated on site. The first lamp offers a rapid surface cure, the second a deeper cure.

By now the web is already on its way to the second print tower without the need to pass through a series of turner bars as in almost every other digital web press. This feature allows Real Digital to run heavier grades of paper, up to 400 microns, because the paper path is straight. The second print unit is a mirror of the first with vacuum, corona treatment and twin uv lamps. The whole structure is positioned on a steel base designed in Hampshire by Edale, better known for its label presses.

The web heads off for finishing, with Rivett persuading Hunkeler to stretch its technology to sheet, slit and trim on the fly; and to add four different perforation types or allow sheeted sections up to 1500mm long to pass for offline folding. It is unlike any other print set-up in its fanatical attention to detail. This includes the neutral grey of everything in the room. Even the air conditioning units high above the presses, which elsewhere in the plant are blue, in this room are the same uniform grey. It is to ensure the best possible conditions to look at the printed result. Many sheetfed printers do not pay this much attention to their prepress area where operators are making critical judgements about colour. Here such decisions are not left to chance.

The results are well worth it. The quality of the print confounds expectations of inkjet quality. This is quality printing no matter how it is produced. Four-colour work stands alongside any other digital process and level with most offset. An in-store poster for a retailer shows high-impact colour worthy of screen print.

If Rivett has built the inkjet presses and the factory to his own designs, his determination has left its mark on the more conventional equipment the company has. In the mailing area there was influence on Buhrs, where ideas have been adopted in the 700 line. In the sheetfed room, the iGen3s have been stretched to 572 x 480mm in order to get even more image area from them – two and half A4s across – and the acoustic toner deposition has been tweaked to print effectively on textured and laid papers.

Away from print, there are 26 miles of network cabling, all emanating from a server room which has the kind of security government departments must dream about. Only four people have access to the server towers, none of the computers on site has a USB slot and the cabling takes away the risk attached to wireless networks.

The storage and processing power amounts to several terabytes, as every printed page has its own 2D barcode, which is used to track it through the print and finishing processes and to ensure the absolute integrity of what is mailed out. Cameras on every piece of equipment, even the folders, can seem intrusive at first, but are necessary to achieve the dream.

It is all a far cry from when the three were starting out with Olwen. Laybourne recalls: “In the 1980s we went to the direct marketing show in London and demonstrated that we could do data mining on a 386 PC. People were used to using mainframe and mini computers so didn’t believe this was possible.” From there the trio progressed into mailing and digital printing using a Scitex inkjet system. But data has always underpinned the print operation; for if Rivett can trace 50 years in print, Laybourne has just as extensive a background in data processing, albeit that the industry is not yet 50 years old.

It is manipulating the data into campaigns and printed pages that drives the print capacity. This means long-term relationships with customers; for as Andy Ruddle points out, setting testing and getting a customer to commit to a campaign can take 18 months. Some are simple, adding a name and a few details to encourage potential customers to take a test drive in a new car; others are far more complex. One customer is a holiday company for whom Real Digital has a database of 24,000 images of tourist sites, beaches, hotels and so on. These can be pulled together in any combination to encourage bookings for next year, either when a customer returns from one holiday or during the peak booking season in the spring. The messaging can be different for each, but the personalisation is rarely in your face. Images are chosen to reflect a lifestyle: the family with children will see kids splashing a pool perhaps, while a retired couple a more relaxing scene. Information is designed to be helpful, pointing out that flights are available from an airport closer to home, perhaps, or providing maps to show other locations within a similar flying time. Ruddle explains that the effectiveness stretches to reviving very dormant customers. “Because we are able to segment so well, we were able to deliver a precise message to customers that had been dormant for three years,” he says.

And there is transpromo – the idea of using a transactional document, like a phone bill, to include sales messages. Rivett explains: “The return on investment on transpromo is well proven and it can turn what has been a cost for companies into a profit centre – but it is demanding.

“If, for example, you are printing mobile phone bills on a standard digital press, say a Versamark, it is a very cheap per-copy solution; but the print quality will not be good enough to sell space to the mobile phone manufacturers like Nokia or Motorola. But if you increase the quality of the printed work to commercial print quality then you can sell that space at so much per square centimetre, a thousand copies, and negate the whole cost of your billing operation. But you need to go for quality.”

This is what the print set-up gives. The iGen3s are rigorously calibrated and checked for quality, the RD presses likewise. On these, different effects are possible through changing the paper. Rivett explains that the ink is always kept the same, but switching to different substrates is responsible for gloss or matt finishes. The uv ink is an expensive part of the operation and the cost of any job is calculated according to its ink coverage. “But one of the advantages we have had through building our own press is that there is no click charge and that is a huge competitive advantage for us,” he adds. A next step will be to use thermochromic inks or an inkjet varnish to add security elements to a document. “Greyscale varnish is going to be hugely important” is the chairman’s prediction.

He’s also looking for a wider press, moving from three A4 images across to four A4 across the web; that being another mark of the scaleabilty of the inkjet system. “We could double resolution or speed by increasing the number of print heads,” Rivett says. “By going four across we would double the output from a single RD machine over any competitor.”

Real Digital already reckons that it is “a couple of years” ahead of anybody else in the market. It is already achieving the sort of colour quality that Kodak is looking for from its Stream technology, at wider page widths, well before that press comes to market. By the time it does, Real Digital will have moved on to another stage. Innovation on this scale demands that you keep moving and neither Rivett nor his colleagues plan to stop yet.


Personalised with a passion

• A mail order wine merchant ships tasting notes with a case for each bottle that a
customer has ordered. Real Digital pulls in the pages for each bottle to custom-produce
the booklet for that case and customer. The customer’s address details on the cover of
the booklet are used as the shipping document.

• A high street bank uses Real Digital to produce its loyalty campaign literature. Each
mailer is in full colour, personalised to the account holder, and showing the kinds of
rewards that are available now and within six months as points are accumulated.

• A travel company sends customers marketing material for a new holiday based on a
profile of the customer, their holidaying history, address and so on, compiling the mail-
out from a database of 24,000 images held online.

• For one campaign Real Digital produced more than one million film posters on the
iGen3s, adding in a target recipient’s name in place of a recognised film star on the
printed piece.

• A French food company is using Real Digital to produce its quarterly mailing to millions
of French households, each with a different combination of money off vouchers, and
each of which is perforated uniquely according to the household.

• The ActionAid charity saw a letter seeking donations to help the crisis in the Congo
turned around, printed and sent out to its registered donors within four days of
contacting the printer.

• A publisher is using the power of the presses to consolidate subscription reminder
mailings across all its titles by printing several reminders on one sheet and batching
them all to achieve significant savings in postal charges.

• The Speaker’s Office in the House of Commons is using Real Digital to send 18-year-
old voters a personalised paper called Voting News. This is designed to encourage
them to vote, the posting being triggered by the recipient’s 18th birthday.