New DI Press at UT Pan American

Printing Services at The University of Texas Pan American has installed a new Presstek 34DI digital offset press to address the demand for affordable four-color printing and to reduce the amount of print the university outsources. Located in Edinburg, Texas, about 10 miles north of the U.S./Mexico border, the university serves nearly 20,000 students with a faculty of about 800.

“Our Printing Services production area was displaced when the university needed the space for a new civil engineering program,” says Robert Cantu, assistant director of Auxiliary Services. “This started a discussion about whether the university needed an in-plant in light of the investment that would be required to retrofit any new space we might be assigned. A Request for Proposal was issued to outsource the operation, but all of the responses we received were print management proposals which would have been more expensive than relocating our services. That left us with the opportunity to refresh our production platform as we made the move to an off-campus production location.”

Printing Services was ultimately relocated to a university-owned building off campus.

“Our equipment was very dated and chemical intensive," Cantu continues. "It was going to cost more than a half million dollars to retrofit the facility with exhaust venting and other environmental changes to accommodate our old conventional press and chemistry-based platesetter. So we sold off our old conventional offset equipment and worked out an interim arrangement for a local printer to handle that aspect of our printing services until we could find an internal solution.

“We were very interested in the Presstek DI press for a variety of reasons," he says. "First and foremost, it significantly reduces VOCs, uses chemistry-free on-press platemaking and waterless printing. Those characteristics, combined with the small physical footprint of the Presstek 34DI, meant that our retrofitting costs would be much more reasonable. It was the ideal piece of equipment for us and was a critical factor in saving our shop from being outsourced.”

Today, The University of Texas Pan American is outsourcing very little print, and the user community is delighted with both the increase in quality and the improved turnaround times the shop can now offer.

“Our operators are in heaven as well,” adds Cantu. “Before we acquired the Presstek 34DI, they were producing four-color work on a one-color press. Now they can do that work much more efficiently, with less waste, and the quality is fabulous.”