Digital Printing-Toner - Cut Sheet (Color)

It was a month before Christmas at Messiah College, and the president's Christmas cards were cracking. The in-plant at this Christian college in Grantham, Pa., was doing everything it could think of to make the card—one of its most important jobs of the year—look its best. But after coming off of the Xerox DocuColor 260 and being scored and folded, the cards were still cracking on the folds.

"We backed off the pressure on the rollers, we [made] certain that the grain of the paper was going the right way, and we let the cards sit for a few days so that the paper would gather back some moisture. No matter what we tried, we were not happy," says Dwayne A. Magee, director of Messiah College Press and Postal Services.

In an article in the December issue of IPG, Ricoh's Greg Cholmondeley writes: In-plants face a never-ending fight for retaining and growing print volume—and this is as it should be. It is always in an enterprise’s best interest to find the most effective way to produce work. For in-plants, this simply means the need to constantly evolve as technologies, competitors, applications and business practices change.

As an example of changing business practices, consider digital color printing. Caslon and Co. reported that in 2006, for the first time ever, the retail value of digital color printing in the U.S exceeded that of black and white—even though digital color print volumes are a fraction of monochrome. Digital color production costs are higher—but then so are the margins.

Join Editor Bob Neubauer as he drives around Montgomery County, PA, visiting in-plants and vendor open houses.

Two-color printing used to be fashionable, remarks Bob Tippins, manager of Graphic Services at Carleton University."But now everyone wants four-color,” he says. For an in-plant with a two-color press, however, this presented a small problem. The 23-employee, Ottawa, Ontario-based in-plant did some four-color work on its 25-year-old two-color Heidelbeg MOZP, but it was, Tippins admits, “very inefficient.

InfoPrint Solutions Co., a joint venture between IBM and Ricoh, today announced that Best Western International, the World’s Largest Hotel Chain®, has successfully grown awareness for its own branded credit card, and increased revenues through incremental bookings via implementation of a TransPromo pilot. The scheme replaced inserts previously included with the program statement, with personalized and targeted promotions on quarterly rewards statements, sent to a segment of Best Western Gold Crown Club International rewards card customers in North America.

Nearly 100 proud parents, school officials, teachers, authors and local dignitaries gathered today at the City of Boca Raton’s Spanish River Library and Community Center to witness 45 middle and high school students from 15 different School District of Palm Beach County schools realize their dreams to become published authors. The students participated in the third annual Océ Future Authors Project summer writing workshop, where they compiled poetry, short stories and essays into a book they named, “Confessions of a Teenage Author.”

To improve both its quality and its delivery time, the University of Texas-Austin has upgraded from a Xerox 2045 to a Xerox 7000. “We were steadily doing 70,000 a month on it, and that’s a lot for a 2045,” says Steve Meadows, Copy Center Manager. The new machine can run card stock at 70 pages per minute, he says. This is just what the in-plant needs to produce book covers, posters, postcards and other common jobs.

Duplo USA has issued an open invitation to a product showcase of its latest digital color finishing equipment at the Radisson Hotel in Trevose, PA on Dec. 10-11. The event will run each day from 10:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m., with lunch provided from 11:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. There will also be a raffle drawing for a MD-161D copier/MFP.

The company is promoting the product showcase as an opportunity to still capitalize on the Economic Stimulus Act of 2008, which has a Dec. 31 deadline. Among the equipment to be featured are the:

Al Kennickell, President of The Kennickell Group talks about how KODAK MARKETMOVER Business Advantage Solutions helped quickly grow his business into a marketing service provider.

Kodak is showcasing a complete set of solutions designed to revolutionize the graphic arts industry and help customers grow their business.