Digital Printing-Toner - Cut Sheet (Color)

NEW ORLEANS' devastation at the hands of Hurricane Katrina was witnessed on TV screens worldwide. But seeing the aftermath first hand, as attendees of the recent National Government Publishing Association conference did, left a far more poignant impression.

FOR 10 YEARS, copying services at Villanova University School of Law were provided by Xerox under a facilities management contract. There were, however, some strings attached. The university had to supply the toner. And students had to bring their own paper.

For the City of Cincinnati, the decision to go with the MGI Meteor DP60 Pro came down to letterhead. The nine-employee in-plant needed a digital color printer to print letterhead that could be run back through a laser printer.

As digital printing platforms take on larger shares of commercial printing, toner production gets serious.

Like many in-plants, the Printing and Mailing Services department at the University of St. Thomas, in St. Paul, Minn., is in the midst of a digital transition. In fact, just a few short weeks ago the 24-employee shop made the decision to get rid of its one remaining offset press—an ABDick 9850 duplicator with a T-head that was being used exclusively for envelopes.

Wayne Guiney, manager of Office Services at Toronto’s Ontario Power Generation Inc. (OPG), made the decision to turn his in-plant into a full digital shop in 2004. He replaced a mix of offset equipment with a pair of Xerox Nuveras, a DocuColor 5252 and two FreeFlow scanning units.

In-plant managers had two opportunities to mingle at the recent PRINT 09 trade show in Chicago. IPG and the In-Plant Printing and Mailing Association each held a separate session for in-plants. Both attracted more than 50 attendees, many from university and insurance in-plants.

It was one of the most important printing jobs of the year...yet it was being printed off campus. That bothered the provost at Longwood University, in rural Farmville, Va. He began asking why the school was paying an outside vendor to print its diplomas instead of sending them to its five-employee in-plant. When word reached Tim Trent, director of Printing Services, he just smiled. His shop was three weeks away from installing a new Xerox 700 digital color press, a device he knew would be more than capable of printing diplomas. Trent invited the provost to visit in a few weeks.

IT STARTED in the parking lot. As he stepped out of his car one day, Greg Cooper, print shop manager for the city of Baltimore's Digital Document Division, happened to run into the city's IT director. They started talking about the checks and bills that IT was printing for the city on its Xerox 92C printers. Cooper told him, flat out, that his in-plant was better positioned to handle this work than IT, whose main focus was supposed to be computers and data.

Digital press technology has opened the door for transpromotional printing, but that doesn't make commercial printing customers—or their customers—walk through it. The promise of transpromo printing has been hampered by what is perceived as a disconnect between the databases harboring audience data, and the ability to format it in an appealing way.