State of New Mexico In-plant Saves Hours with New Equipment

With the five-year leases on its two color and two black-and-white printers about to lapse at the end of November 2024, New Mexico’s State Printing Services had some important decisions to make. Those decisions, says Director Rob Newlin, have ended up saving his staff many hours’ worth of work.

The Santa Fe-based in-plant installed two Ricoh Pro C9500 digital color presses in October to replace a pair of Ricoh Pro C9200 printers. And while Newlin opted to simply replace the two Ricoh Pro 8320 black-and-white sheetfed printers, he decided to boost the six-employee in-plant’s capabilities further by adding a completely new piece of equipment: the Ricoh Auto Color Adjuster (RACA), which can create ICC profiles in minutes and match color from pre-printed samples.

Rob Newlin loads artwork from the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum into the Ricoh Auto Color Adjuster, which can create ICC profiles in minutes and match color from pre-printed samples.

One of the biggest benefits of the Ricoh C9500, Newlin says, is its 5,000-sheet stacker, an optional add-on the in-plant uses when the in-line Plockmatic saddle stitcher isn’t running.

“In the past, for instance, on the 9200, if I had a job of 2,000 sheets, I would not run it at the end of the night because it would be a concern that it might spill off the output tray,” he says. “But with the stacker, I can set up the job and run it, and it runs right to the stacker. I can leave for the night, come back the next morning, and the job's complete. Basically, I picked up anywhere from an hour and a half to two hours of runtime because of the stacker.”

Related story: Swapping Six Printers for Four Brings Savings, Productivity to New Mexico

Additionally, Newlin notes that, with the C9200s, the in-line Plockmatic had to be undocked when it wasn’t in use. With the C9500s, however, the Plockmatic can stay in place all the time, eliminating the hassle of docking and undocking it.

The 9500s can print a range of projects, he says, including standard stationery like business cards and letterheads; voting documents for the Secretary of State; trifold brochures; and even coloring books for the New Mexico Department of Game & Fish.

Color calibration for the C9500s has seen great time savings thanks to the RACA, which the in-plant installed in mid-December. Previously, calibrating both C9200s at once with a spectrophotometer would take about an hour, Newlin says. Using the RACA saves about half an hour, he says, because calibration is simpler — plus, it doesn’t need to be done every day.

Newlin also notes that the RACA system can help with color consistency, even when the desired color was printed on a different machine or a long time ago.

“I had a sample from my old press that I printed, say, a year ago, and I'm printing it off on the new press,” Newlin offers as a hypothetical. “The color doesn't match, and the customer's pretty picky about that. Basically, you take the PDF file that has to be in CYMK, you load that into the RACA, you scan … the sample you want to match — so that was my sample from a year ago. And then I scan in my current sample that I printed today, and it then looks at all three components [and] makes adjustments. You load that new profile into the job and voila — now you're printing just the way it looked a year ago.”

Rob Newlin uses the Ricoh Auto Color Adjuster to scan a project and create a color profile.

While the in-plant certainly considered other OEMs for its equipment needs, Newlin says the shop’s existing relationship with Ricoh had a big impact on the decision.

“I have a great relationship with Ricoh; the tech has taught me a lot,” he says. “So, a lot of it really does have to do with the tech — his service, his knowledge, his ability to teach me.” Newlin adds that the availability of Ricoh’s operator training, RCOP, also pushed him toward sticking with Ricoh.

During installation, the Ricoh team was dedicated to making sure everything was up to snuff, he adds.

“There were some challenges that they faced,” Newlin recalls. “But Ricoh stepped up and those three [installers] one night stayed until midnight because they did encounter some roadblocks that took some problem-solving. They got behind schedule, so they stayed until midnight in order to catch up and maintain the schedule, so I really appreciated that.”