Guests at launch go to press

Meteor Print's new press is a sleek grey box that can do everything except make a cup of tea.

The Xerox 800 Digital Press was lifted in pieces into a top storey room in the Wanganui print and design business a month ago by crane.

The press was launched on Wednesday night with about 150 guests in attendance, who trooped up the stairs in groups of 20 to have a good look at the machine.

"It is amazing the ideas clients came up with after seeing the machine and its capabilities," owner Warren Ruscoe said.

The new press has been leased from Xerox, rather than being bought, because digital printing is seen as changing so fast these days that a new and better version could be just months away.

Mr Ruscoe said the new press could change colours and personalise portions of large and small print runs. It prints on heavier cardboards and can produce a high-quality job folded, stapled, trimmed, dry and ready to deliver.

It replaces a lot of the traditional work done by the chunky, inky offset presses downstairs at Meteor's Ridgway St premises.

The launch wasn't the first big event to be hosted at the printing business recently. Mr Ruscoe also had a lot of visitors through his premises during the Heritage Open Days last month.

He said the room where former Wanganui mayor Charles Mackay shot Walter D'Arcy Cresswell was packed with people when historian Paul Diamond told the story of that misadventure in 1920.