Digital Printing-Toner - Cut Sheet (Color)

After getting by for the past couple of decades with minimal investment, Ashland University Printing Services has carried out some major equipment upgrades, allowing the shop to bring a significant amount of printing back in-house. About a year and a half ago, the Ashland, Ohio-based university invested in a new four-color Heidelberg Speedmaster 52, along with a Heidelberg Suprasetter computer-to-plate device with Prinect workflow. At the same time, the shop replaced its aging Baum folder with a 20˝ Stahl folder from Heidelberg. 

Last month, OKI Data Americas invited IPG to its Mt. Laurel, N.J., facility for a sneak peek at several new color printers it was about to unveil for the graphic arts market. Long a supplier of LED technology to other graphic arts equipment vendors, OKI has made a name for itself in the office products environment. Now the company is moving into the production color printing environment too, directly challenging the existing suppliers of digital color printers. 

FOR THE in-plant at the Research and Curriculum Unit (RCU) at Mississippi State University, there's always something new to learn about printing—and something new to print about learning.

If you are working with direct mail marketing, e-mail marketing (with or without PURLs), mobile media marketing, transpromo or collateral fulfillment and you are trying to personalize the material to improve the response, then you know it is not easy to pull it all together.

At the University of Arkansas Division of Agriculture, the decision to switch from offset to digital was a practical one. "We had a 20x28˝ Sakurai offset press and some smaller Hamadas, but we couldn’t find any press operators,” remarks Jon Flaxman, director of Printing Services for the Little Rock, Ark., school. “So we just made the decision, we are going to go totally digital.” In October, the four-employee in-plant installed a new Kodak NexPress S2500 digital color press with a fifth imaging station. So far it has exceeded Flaxman’s hopes. “We definitely now get more consistent color than we’ve ever had,” he contends.

IPG Editor Bob Neubauer recently visited four different New York City in-plants to learn about their operations.

New York was decked out for Christmas when IPG Editor Bob Neubauer went there to visit four in-plants: NBC, Metropolitan Museum of Art, AXA Equitable and the NY Presbyterian Hospital.

In June 2009, the In-Plant Printing and Mailing Association (IPMA) met in Rochester, NY, for a successful conference that drew more than 100 in-plant managers.

The University of Houston’s Printing and Postal Service department celebrated its 60th anniversary last month, an event that honored not only the in-plant’s longevity but its recent advancements as well. Over the past 12 months, the 30-employee shop has added several major pieces of offset and digital printing equipment, gearing itself up for a very busy 2010.

For the past few years, color printing has been a challenge for the Girl Scouts of Wisconsin Southeast (GSWISE). That all changed recently when GSWISE installed a new Ricoh Pro C900 digital color press. Now the color printing opportunities are endless, and the organization is taking full advantage of them.