New Digital Gear Makes Envelopes Easy at UWA

Jimmy Robinson used to dread printing envelopes. Running a box of them was essentially a two-hour project, between inking up his shop’s A.B.Dick press, printing and then cleaning up. This was time his four-employee in-plant at the University of West Alabama could hardly afford.

So when he heard fellow Alabama in-plant manager Glenda Miley, of Auburn University, raving about her Xanté Ilumina Digital Envelope Press, he paid close attention.

“She told me what a great machine it was,” says Robinson, director of UWA’s Department of Printing, in Livingston, Ala.

After getting bids from several vendors, his shop took delivery of a Xanté Ilumina Digital Envelope Press this fall. Now those envelope jobs have been reduced to just eight minutes per box, he says.

“Nobody runs out of envelopes at this university any more,” Robinson declares.

One of the main deciding factors that made him go with the Xanté, he says, was its color accuracy.

“Xanté hit our red (PMS 186) the first time, perfectly,” he praises.

The fact that his shop can now print four colors on envelopes is another big plus. He hopes to start marketing this capability in January.

Robinson is also very happy with the Xanté iQueue workflow software that came free with the press.

“It gives you the cost of the job before you do it,” he says. It also lets him make color and density adjustments, select a line screen and screening type, track run quantities and monitor consumables.

To help defray the cost of the new Ilumina Digital Envelope Press, Robinson got a commitment from another in-plant to buy his shop’s A.B.Dick.

The new Ilumina prints more than just envelopes. The in-plant has already used it to print posters, flyers and variable data postcards.

“It’s also a backup color machine to our [Xerox] 700,” he notes—which, by the way, is also new at the shop. The digital color press replaced a Xerox 5000 just a month before the Xanté device arrived. Robinson is very happy with the 700, which uses oil-free toner, and came with a bookletmaker and additional delivery trays.

“I got more machine, more features, for less money,” he enthuses.

One new line of business the in-plant has gotten into is textbook printing. The university acquired a company called bby Publications, and the in-plant now prints all of its textbooks on a Xerox 4127, which it added a year ago just for this purpose.

Books average 200 pages each, with runs ranging from 30 to 150 copies. Color covers are printed on the 700 and inserted using the 4127’s bypass tray. The machine has an inline GBC punch, so all employees have to do is spin in the coils. Robinson estimates that textbook printing will increase his shop’s total sales volume by 25 percent.