Xerox Iridesse

Most fifth-color presses make you choose one specialty ink and often slow down to use it. The Iridesse carries up to six inline stations and prints CMYK plus two specialty dry inks simultaneously, in one pass, at its full 120 A4 pages per minute, maintained across media weights. The specialty palette covers metallic gold, metallic silver, white, clear and fluorescent pink, positioned either under or over the CMYK layer.

That underprint/overprint architecture is what designers love. Lay silver under CMYK and every color printed on top becomes a metallic hue — the mixed-metallics technique that gives the press its name — producing rose golds, metallic blues and champagne tones without foil stamping or a second machine pass. Fluorescent pink lifts retail and event work off the page, white and clear open dark and colored stocks, and Full Belt Roll fusing keeps gloss consistent across the sheet.

Underneath the effects sits a serious production engine: 2400 x 2400 dpi print resolution with a 1200 x 1200 x 10-bit Ultra HD RIP pipeline, sheets to 330 x 488 mm standard and XLS long sheets to 330 x 1,200 mm simplex, media from 52 to 400 gsm, and a duty cycle up to 475,000 pages per month. New presses configure at roughly USD 150,000-300,000, and early units coming off lease now trade used at USD 50,000-120,000 — putting single-pass metallics within reach of ambitious mid-size shops.

The business case is margin, not volume. Invitations, greeting cards, packaging prototypes and premium marketing sell for multiples of plain CMYK pricing, and in Vietnam the wedding-stationery market alone can keep an Iridesse busy. For a trade printer, being the only shop in the district that prints metallics digitally is a moat — one reason the Iridesse has become the embellishment flagship for printers not ready for Indigo money.