Arkansas State Adds Xerox 700

Late getting into digital color, Arkansas State University Printing Services has just installed a Xerox 700 color printer. According to David Maloch, assistant director, the choice was anything but a snap decision. Equipped with sheetfed presses as well as a Fairchild NewsKing web press for printing the student newspaper and class schedules, the nine-employee Jonesboro-based operation could not accommodate the growing number of short-run color jobs, Maloch says. So to find the best digital printer, Printing Services managed to convince three different vendors to install their competing machines for month-long trial runs, one after the other, at no cost to the in-plant.

Printing Services staff felt that there were three important criteria the trial machines had to meet:

• The machines had to be capable of handling a range of paper stocks including 100-lb. gloss cover.

• Each machine was evaluated on how closely it reproduced specific colors.

• Registration of the image from sheet to sheet and from front to back on two-sided copies had to be excellent.

After all three trial runs, the Printing Services employees were unanimous in their opinions that the Xerox 700 excelled in all criteria.

“During the trial runs we were very critical of color and registration,” says Maloch. “The Xerox machine performed very well compared to the other brand machines we tried. We produced trial documents but also produced many real orders that we sold to customers. Through this we expected and found that we can make money with this device. That’s the bottom line.”

Thanks to the Xerox 700, the in-plant is now bringing in short-run color work that had previously been sent off campus.

“So the 700 is not necessarily taking work away from our offset presses, it is actually creating a new revenue stream,” says Maloch.