MSU Upgrades Digital Color Printer

Michigan State University is “very picky” about quality and registration, says Dennis Seybert, manager of Print and Digital Communications. So when the in-plant’s Konica Minolta bizhub PRO C500 left the shop a little unimpressed, it decided to upgrade.

In January, the East Lansing, Mich.-based in-plant swapped the C500 for a new bizhub PRO 6501 color printer.

“The registration front-to-back on cover stock is very important, and this machine does register front to back,” notes Seybert. “It handles larger solids and it handles variable data.”

The latter capability is an area the in-plant plans to get more involved in, and Seybert sees the 6501 as a good first step.

The new machine is more of a workhorse than the previous printer too. With the C500 the shop was limited to 25,000 clicks a month, he says.

“We fully expect to push this one beyond 50,000 clicks a month within the next few months,” Seybert says. “It’s going to bring in business that we couldn’t do previously, and it’s going to bring back work that we’ve been outsourcing to vendors because we just couldn’t produce it with quality and timeliness in-house.”

This includes projects with both color and black-and-white pages.

“It has a very cost-effective black-and-white click price, so consequently we can print books that have color and black-and-white mixed,” he says. These books can be finished with the 6501’s inline saddle stitcher and face trimmer.