Mike Povio, the Senior Systems Engineer at Xerox, speaks to Small Enterprise about the company’s new Ultra Lightweight Stock Printing Kit

Tell us about the new Ultra Lightweight Stock Printing Kit from Xerox?
The new Ultra Lightweight Stock Printing Kit [ULW Kit] is the latest innovation for the Xerox Nuvera high volume mono production print system. The ULW kit enables a Nuvera printing system to reliably feed, image, fuse, and stack 44-gsm paper. Opening more avenues for offset migration and the increasing demand for lighter weight books and booklets, pharmaceutical inserts, financial prospectus and all applications that require a reduction in weight – helping to drive savings in shipping, storage, or binding size.

The installation of this ULW kit does not sacrifice any of the performance or quality that the Xerox Nuvera is known for. Switching between ultra-lightweight paper and other heavier paper is as simple as turning the feature on or off. The system makes all the adjustments, eliminating operator change over, or lost production print time.

The ULW kit is comprised of patented hardware and software technology components available for as an upgrade for newer Nuvera Production Printing Systems. When installed, it extends a Nuvera’s lightest approved paperweight specification down to 44-gsm—the lightest in the industry for this class of cut-sheet speed and volume, without sacrificing the ability to also run jobs as heavy as 300-gms.

Who is the target audience for this product?
Trends show that books—trade, religious, manuals, and more are a key driver of cut-sheet digital mono page growth. The Ultra Lightweight Stock Printing Kit will be targeted towards publishers and book printers, as they are also the fastest-growing segment in mono digital printing.

In addition to books, pharmaceutical inserts — printed on SRA3 / 12″ x 18″ sheets that need to be very folded down to small inserts — or financial prospectus materials, manuals, handbooks, and dozens of other applications all benefit from ultra-lightweight paper.  Regardless of the application, the ultra-lightweight paper offers real cost advantages. Thinner sheets take less room on a bookshelf or inside a package. The ultra-lightweight also impacts shipping and mailing costs, which can help your customers better manage their overall budgets.

What sort of jobs can be completed using this stock printing kit?
Depending on the customer’s configuration the ultra-lightweight kit can produce over 9 million pages per month on a Nuvera system. This allows the customer to print large volumes on the 44-gsm paper to support a multitude of jobs, outputting ULW sheets to the modified stacker, making it easy to transport the job to finishing.

Does the kit accompany any price advantage over similar products on the market?
Nuvera is the industry leader in offering an unprecedented level of quality, uptime, and a very low cost per sheet. By expanding the customer’s range of paper and keeping the same high level of image quality and uptime performance, gives the customers a competitive advantage to much shorter count offset jobs run today. The ULW kit offers powerful processing, optimized job setup time, and efficient inline stacking which reduces the overall cost for the customer.

Nuvera not only prints on the lightest weight stock in the industry, but it also does it without sacrificing productivity. The engineering team at Xerox designed the ULW kit for simple operation. Enabling printing on the ultra-lightweight paper requires a few simple clicks and the systems are ready to print. The system will adjust automatically with no wait time unlike competitive systems such as the Canon Océ VarioPrint TITAN Series, which can take up to 20 minutes for the operator to reset, time that negatively offsets the economic benefits customers could see from running the media.

What opportunities does the Ultra Lightweight Stock Printing Kit bring along to customers?
Xerox is always trying to meet customer requirements and keep up to date with trends. Recently, we’ve seen a trend of lighter media being used therefore, we developed this ULW kit as it can be used for any application that requires the reduction in weight for a publication. This gives the customer the opportunity to expand into larger volumes and/or additional markets and titles with this new ultra-lightweight stock.

In addition to books, pharmaceutical prescription pamphlets, SRA3 / 12″ x 18″ sheets that need to be very thin in order to fold down to small packets, financial prospectus materials, manuals, handbooks, and dozens of other applications can all benefit from ultra-lightweight paper.  The ultra-lightweight paper offers real cost advantages. Thinner sheets take less room on a bookshelf or inside a package. The ultra-lightweight also impacts shipping and mailing costs, which can help your customers better manage their overall budgets.

Does using this stock printing kit require printers to make changes to their workflow?
No changes to customer workflow when running ULW stock on a Nuvera. Simple turning the feature on and normal programming of the job is all that is required. The ULW kit is compatible with newer Nuvera running either the 13.x or 14.x Nuvera software release and any newly ordered Nuvera Production Printing System.

Any other info you would like to add?
Monochrome cut sheet production is the backbone of the digital print market, comprising 63% of its total pages. The Xerox Nuvera Production Printing System is the technology powerhouse behind the majority of those pages—over 35 billion in 2018 alone—thanks to our continued market leadership.

This deep experience gives Xerox a unique perspective on the inner workings of the market, inspiring ongoing technology investments that ensure our customers are prepared to capitalize on growing application spaces. The Xerox Ultra Lightweight Stock Printing Kit is the latest Nuvera innovation and your newest opportunity. With the lightest stock weight in the industry—44-gsm—on our maximum sheet size, customers can capture their share of the growing books market while maintaining the signature Nuvera productivity, quality, and economics they depend on.