New Printer in Portland Helps Keep Work In-house

Color printing may once have been thought of as a wasteful extravagance in government agencies, but much has changed since digital printing arrived on the scene.

“That attitude is evolving,” remarks Ron Hadduck, manager of Printing & Distribution Services for the City of Portland, Ore. “Requests for color have gone up.”

Since installing its new Konica Minolta bizhub PRESS C7000, the 12-employee in-plant now prints an average of 155,000 color 8.5x11˝ pages a month. That’s a 55 percent increase in monthly color pages over what the shop produced on its previous printer, a bizhub PRO C6500.

“It’s built to run some volumes,” says Hadduck of the new 70-page-per-minute printer. “It’s a production machine.”

This jump in color printing is all part of the in-plant’s strategy.

“We’ve been trying to keep all the short-run color in, instead of vending it out,” he says.

This work includes brochures, posters, covers for reports and other critical color jobs that the in-plant previously could not handle. The C7000 uses Simitri HD polymerized toner, which has a smaller particle size to provide fine image detail.

“It’s a step up in quality,” praises Hadduck.

The machine came with inline folding and saddle-stitching capabilities and a post-process inserter for adding pre-printed pages.

“It’s a pretty fully configured machine,” he remarks.

To show it off, the shop held an open house, which drew 150 people to its downtown Portland facility. Hadduck says the C7000 is working out so well, he is considering adding a second one.

“We’re a complete chargeback here, and part of our charge is capital replacement, so I’ve got a fund dedicated for this,” he says. “So I can pretty much buy what I need.”