Product Portfolio: Me & My Machine - Oce VarioStream 9210.

The 9210's duplex printing and full-colour potential fit perfectly with Inkfish's grand designs, finds Josh Brooks.

Inkfish Services has recently become one of the big hitters in the mailing business. The Coventry-based company has more than doubled its capacity to 150m items per year, following a move into a brand new 5,200m2 factory on the outskirts of the city.

This has all been backed up, of course, by a raft of investment in new kit (PrintWeek, 7 October). And the centrepiece of that spend is without doubt the company's Oce VarioStream 9210, the first of the Oce 9000 series in the UK.

'Because of the nature of some of our major clients we do a lot of mailings which are on pre-printed generic stationery, and we can't personalise them with customer details,' explains Inkfish Services operations manager Steve Garbett (pictured).

'The option that this machine gives us, when it evolves into a full-colour laser printer in two years' time, is to enable us to go from plain paper going into the machine to full-colour printed logos coming out the other end with fully variable text on it. To us, it's a great USP.'

The printer, which can currently laser-print up to 800 A4 double-sided sheets per minute mono with variable data, is designed to evolve to full-colour within two years - a first for a machine running at that speed.

But colour capability was not all that attracted Inkfish, which has used Oce equipment for five years, to the 9000.