Offset Out for Iowa Bankers Association

When the Iowa Bankers Association installed a four-color Ryobi 3304 in 2007, Todd Palmer was excited that his two-employee in-plant would be able to bring the majority of the association’s four-color printing in-house. But a lot can change in eight years.

“We retained all the four-color by buying the four-color [press],” he acknowledges, “but the problem is the quantities dropped quite a bit.”

Items like newsletters, conference promotional materials and marketing brochures were being ordered by the hundreds rather than the thousands, with fast delivery times expected.

“Everybody wanted everything right now,” says Palmer, printing coordinator at the Johnston, Iowa, facility.

The in-plant had installed a Konica Minolta bizhub PRESS C7000 in 2011, but Palmer knew it couldn’t handle all the shop’s jobs by itself. So last summer, Palmer reluctantly sold the Ryobi to an envelope printer in Atlanta and fired up a new Xerox J75 in its place. The in-plant purchased a demo model with 36,000 impressions on it.

“The price we got it for, we just could not pass it up,” he remarks.

Palmer especially likes the J75’s inline booklet maker with a face trimmer and square spine binder.

“For our newsletter, that actually makes it look really nice,” he compliments.

With features like an in-line spectrophotometer and automated color calibration, the J75 offers excellent color consistency and 2,400x2,400-dpi quality. The Xerox FreeFlow print server RIPs jobs faster than the C7000, Palmer says, and the press maintains its rated speed of 75 pages per minute while running heavier stocks.

“I find that the J75 feeds card stock better than the Konica,” he notes, which is helpful for the numerous post card jobs the shop runs.

He and coworker Kristi Junkin also like that they can replace the drum and fuser on the J75 without having to wait for service.

A month after installing the J75, the in-plant added a Xerox D125 for printing black-and-white training manuals, mailings and other monochrome work. It, too, was a demo machine.

“They made us a real good deal,” Palmer says.