Digital Printing-Wide Format - Roll to Roll

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.

When printers were surveyed earlier this year by the Graphic Arts Show Co. about what piques their interest at trade shows, wide-format printing topped the list. And no wonder. Forecasts for several years running have shown that some of the fastest market segments—folding cartons, point-of-purchase, vehicle wraps, etc.—are serviced by printing platforms that seem to know no size limits.

Alvin B. Griffin thought he was out of the wide-format business when his in-plant’s HP 750 became obsolete. Griffin, director of the Graphic Production Center for the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, resigned himself to relying on commercial printers to produce large-format products for his customers.

How do you turn a rusty, 20-year-old delivery truck into the talk of the town? If you’re an in-plant with wide-format printing equipment, you wrap it in colorful promotional images and send it back onto the streets. That’s what the staff at The Hershey Company’s in-plant did to an old Isuzu box truck. They used their 54˝ Roland Soljet Pro III XJ solvent ink-jet printer to transform the truck from an embarrassment into a gem.

According to IPG data, almost 22 percent of in-plants have an imagesetter. Until last month, one of them was the University of Mississippi, which has been churning out film with a Screen Katana for years. The main reason the shop stuck with it? “It was paid for,” laughs Tony Seaman, director of Printing and Graphic Services at the Oxford, Miss., shop. 

Make sure your heaters are on only when you need them.

The University of Washington has not even started marketing its new HP Designjet Z6100 wide-format printer and already it’s grabbing the attention of customers. The 42˝ printer was placed in the copy center at the undergraduate library, where it is visible to passing students. “They go there for other things and they notice the posters,” says Patrick McNelly, operations manager. Students have been ordering a lot of posters for class projects and presentations, he says, with demand peaking around midterms and finals. “We’re now starting to see some repeat customers, and we’ve gotten a lot of good feedback on the quality,”

In-plants that offer wide-format printing have found it to be an excellent value-added service—and more than half of them now offer this service, according to our latest survey. Once customers get a taste, they keep coming back for more. Many in-plants add ink-jet printers for proofing, only to discover a pent-up demand for posters, banners and the like.

VALHALLA, NY—March 20, 2008—Fujifilm U.S.A., Inc. today announced that the Wide Format Ink-jet business unit of Fujifilm Hunt Chemicals U.S.A., Inc. will become part of Fujifilm U.S.A.’s Imaging Division as of April 1, 2008. Moving forward, retailers and professional labs will benefit from the convenience of a single point of order for all imaging hardware and supplies, including wide format ink-jet products. “Many of our customers are currently expanding their Frontier solutions to generate revenue from a wide range of products beyond traditional 4”x 6” prints,” said John Placko, senior product manager, Wide Format Inkjet Products, Imaging Division, Fujifilm U.S.A. “Today’s announcement

WIDE-FORMAT digital imaging is one of today’s hottest markets. If you’re sending business outside of your facility because you don’t have the capabilities to fulfill orders, you could be ready to add a wide-format device. Wide-format digital imaging is taking printers to a whole new level in their product offerings. The technology allows companies to print on more surfaces than ever before and provide greater customization options. “It’s rewriting what the printing industry can do in terms of full color and variable data,” says Michael Robertson, president and CEO of the Specialty Graphic Imaging Association (SGIA). “Wide-format digital imaging has really shifted