COVER STORY
Mediapoint crosses over from wide format to labels category Labels would not be the first thing that the industry associates with Melbourne-based trade printer – Mediapoint.
Jamie Xuereb from trade printer Mediapoint has gone back to the future and has re-entered the label category with a new Durst Tau RSC E
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ut then again this isn’t the first time that Mediapoint has been in the labels category.
Mediapoint was a front runner in its exploration of the labels and stickers market when they entered the category 12 years ago. But at the time, both the printing and the finishing were not delivering the professional outcomes that the market and Mediapoint wanted. “When we entered the labels and stickers printing market, we encountered the same pain points that our customers had. We kept searching for the technology to overcome these challenges while also using our existing equipment to meet the market’s needs,” Mediapoint sales director Jamie Xuereb said. “Although it wasn’t as efficient and the quality wasn’t where we wanted it to be,
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it was the best value-for-money solution at the time. Most of our resell partners and other providers in the market still do the same thing – use their wide format printers, plotters, rulers and Stanley knives to produce these jobs. It’s an inefficient process, especially for volume work,” he said. So the decision was made to drop out of the label sector, and also become a business purely focusing on trade work and specifically in wide format printing. “We were doing work for everyone at the beginning and I then realised that 18 of our top 20 clients were trade customers. So, 11 years ago we culled our retail customers and became a business completely focused on trade printing,” Xuereb said. “We were originally going to re-enter the labels sector in 2020, but Covid put things on ice for us.
“We saw the Tau RSC E at Durst headquarters in Brixen in 2019 and recognised that it was a premium machine that was also upgradable to meet our future needs for additional capacity when the time comes. The capabilities of the Durst Tau during the demonstration were astonishing. The prints at 1200dpi and a two-picolitre drop were the best I had seen and did not expect from an inkjet UV printer. I had not even seen any digital sheetfed prints in the local market that were of that quality. At this point, we knew the print technology was ready for what Mediapoint wanted to achieve.” As a 330mm-wide advanced solution for digital label printing, the Tau RSC E has a real print speed of 50m/min. It also guarantees that future increased production capacity requirements are covered with a field upgrade available to 80m/min.
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