Banners Now Printed In-house at UT Knoxville

Until recently, when the University of Tennessee Graphic Arts Service needed to print a banner for an outdoor event, the in-plant had to outsource the work. For posters, the shop used an HP inkjet copier. But that has all changed since the Knoxville in-plant purchased a 64˝ Mutoh ValueJet 1608 Hybrid wide-format printer.

“We were getting customers ordering banners, and we were sending them out,” reports Acting Director Jack Williams. “It got to a point where there was too much demand, and we needed something to handle it.”

A week after the shop installed the device, a customer ordered 10 rigid signs and banners for a convention at the university. The in-plant turned them around within 24 hours.

“They were very pleased with the quality of the job,” Williams enthuses. “I think we have a solid customer with them.”

However, as with any new device, the in-plant dealt with a learning curve. Before it completely mastered the wide-format printer, the shop would do a small run to make sure all the colors were correct and to the exact specifications that the customer ordered.

”Initially, it was trial and error. But we are now at a point we don’t have to do those trial runs anymore,” Williams says. “That’s why we didn’t market it at first. I think now our volume is going to escalate. There is a lot of interest, a lot of demand for it. We will market it and I think it will be a pretty good revenue stream for us.”

Last year, the 48-employee in-plant generated $60,000 from posters. Williams feels “that can be easily doubled” with the new printer. Due to the demand for banners and posters, it was not hard for the in-plant to justify the cost of the device. Williams toured a facility near Nashville to test out the model and came away very pleased with it.

The in-plant, which has a budget of $7 million, picked the 64˝ Mutoh ValueJet 1608 Hybrid model because it can be used for both car wraps and rigid substrates.

“If they didn’t come up with the hybrid, I couldn’t have justified the cost because we simply don’t do enough substrate material,” Williams explains.

Mutoh’s ValueJet 1608 Hybrid printer prints directly onto corrugated plastics, polystyrene, PVC, acrylic, polycarbonate, foam board, aluminum composite, banner material, vinyl and more. The ValueJet 1608 reaches board printing speeds up to 120 square feet per hour in production mode, and offers print resolutions up to 1,440x1,440 dpi.

The University of Tennessee, Knoxville and The University of Tennessee, Martin will be hosting the 2011 Southeastern University Printing and Digital Managers Conference. The conference will be held at the Embassy Suites-Vanderbilt in Nashville.