California In-plant Adds Four-color Offset Press

Though digital color presses have clearly come to dominate the in-plant environment, not every in-plant has abandoned offset.

In September, the seven-employee Printing Services department at the San Bernardino Community College District fired up a brand new four-color Ryobi 524GE, a replacement for its previous two-color Hamada. Quality, speed and ease of use have vastly improved, notes Supervisor Louis Chavira—and customers have noticed, right from the first annual report job printed on the new press.

“They couldn’t stop complimenting us on how nice it looked, and how quick it got done,” he says

The addition of a four-color offset press at a small in-plant in these tough economic times certainly stands out, especially when the shop also does a fair amount of digital printing, yet chooses to stick with offset.

But Chavira explains that the schools he prints for (San Bernardino College and Crafton Hills College) are demanding high-quality color. Seven years ago this demand helped the in-plant justify the two-color Hamada. But when customers learned the shop could do process work with the press, requests for four-color flyers, brochures and magazines began to rise.

So a couple years ago, when the economy was stronger, Chavira started looking at four-color presses. But prices were high, and his proposal didn’t go anywhere. He says he considered toner-based digital presses too, but they were even more costly and would have required upgrades to his graphics department.

In January 2010, with color demand still strong, he tried again, and this time found that prices for offset presses had dropped by nearly half, thanks to the sour economy and hungry vendors.

“That really saved us a lot of money,” he says.

Chavira praises his boss, Dr. Glen R. Kuck, executive director of Distributed Education & Technology Services, for supporting the in-plant’s efforts to get the press and other new equipment.

“He really went out of his way to convince our chancellor that we needed new equipment in order to better serve our institutions,” Chavira observes.

Since installing the new Ryobi, Chavira and his operators have been more than happy with its time-saving features, like automatic blanket and ink roller cleaning and semiautomatic plate changing. Ryobi Program Inking automatically supplies ink to rollers to match the image from the start of printing, and lets the operator save and recall previous ink setups.

With a maximum printing area of 19.88x13.78˝, the press boasts speeds of up to 11,000 sheets per hour. Jobs that used to take four days on the two-color press, Chavira says, are now done in a day and a half. And the quality of the printed product is much better, he adds.

“There is no comparison,” he insists.

Despite this new offset investment, though, the in-plant has not neglected its digital side. It also just added a Konica Minolta C65hc color printer, which has greatly improved the shop’s color capabilities. The 65-ppm printer outputs high chroma color prints that closely match the RGB color customers see on their screens, with no blotches or streaks. It uses oil-less fusing and Simitri HD Toner, made up of smaller, more uniform particles, which produce more vivid images. Plus it handles a larger sheet size (13x19.2˝) than the shop’s previous Océ CS220, so the in-plant can do full bleeds now.

The in-plant also installed a 120-ppm Konica Minolta bizhub PRO black-and-white printer, with inline folding, punching and stapling. This will help the shop better handle the high volume of quick copy jobs it gets daily.

In addition to these acquisitions, Chavira was instrumental in setting up a district-wide copier management program, which recently replaced 745 units with 245 Konica Minolta printers and copiers.

“It saved us about $320,000 a year,” he notes.