Epson America

Having a wide-format color ink-jet printer in-house can provide a valuable service to your customers. To be successful—and stay alive—you must provide your customers with better service than commercial printers. That means giving the customers what they want, when they want it. For Tino Castro, this meant purchasing a 12-color 52˝ ColorSpan Displaymaker 12 wide-format color ink-jet printer last year. "For the past two to three years I've seen [demand] increase," says the printing services manager for the County of Riverside, Calif. In the past, customers would come into his 20-employee shop with work orders for posters or banners and Castro would have

The world of color scanners is constantly changing. Discover new advances and products that can benefit your in-plant. COLOR SCANNING isn't what it used to be. Say good-bye to the time-consuming task of separating transparencies from prints and switching scanner modes accordingly. Today's scanners recognize what's on the bed and automatically change the mode for you, allowing you to scan film, slides and photos on the same device. "That's been the target machine that the manufacturers were trying to get to," says Don Rogers, product manager for scanners at Heidelberg Prepress. "These scanners allow all the work to be handled in-house without investing in

Do you need a wide-format ink-jet printer? How do you know? And how do you get your organization to buy one—and then use it? Here are a few tips. HAS THIS happened to you? Someone comes to your in-plant with a disk or print-out and asks if you can make posters. Although you'd love say that you can, you know your shop doesn't have the capabilities. The client now has to outsource the project, and isn't happy about it. It's the third time this week this has happened. A wide-format ink-jet printer would have come in handy right then. The problem is you don't

Vendors offer an increasing variety of media for wide-format ink-jet printers. Find out which factors you should consider before buying. Picking the right paper for a wide-format ink-jet job can be a daunting prospect. Your choices include economy papers, water-resistant stock, self-adhesives, matte, glossy and satin finishes, canvas, silky polyester and vinyl. Films come in clear, white, reverse-print backlit or front-print backlit, erasable media, double-coated, Mylar and more. You have to consider the printer and ink combination, whether the application is indoor or outdoor, how color-saturated the print will be, the quality you want, how long the print needs to last,

Better color management and expanded spot colors are increasing the accuracy of halftone proofs and facilitating an all-digital workflow. It seems that every flavor of digital proofer is pushing to better mimic press conditions, deliver stable, accurate color and provide printers with the best tool for making the customer happy: the contract proof. Easier said than done? Maybe not. Contract proofers, sporting better color management, expanded spot colors and flexible multisetting capabilities, are prepared to push the contract digital proof to the next level. Kodak Polychrome Graphics reports that the Kodak Approval XP4 halftone digital color proofing system with Open Front End (OFE) will

Printers showed up in force to see the latest in graphic arts technology and learn how E-Commerce might affect their futures. From all reports, Graph Expo 99 was a huge success. According to the Graphic Arts Show Co., which organized the event, 45,217 people took part—including numerous in-plant managers who stopped to chat with In-Plant Graphics' staff at our booth. All told, the show's 622 exhibitors occupied more than 430,000 net square feet of booth space. IPG spent three days walking the show floor at Chicago's McCormick Place, examining the new equipment and talking to the numerous E-Commerce vendors. Here's what

The leaders of the digital graphic arts industry converged in Boston recently to display their latest wares. Seybold returned to Boston this year after a two-year stint in New York—and what a homecoming it was. All the leaders of the digital graphic arts industry were on hand to show off their new technologies. Adobe, naturally, took a lead position at the show, as the father of PDF. Adobe President John Warnock and CEO Charles Geschke laid out their collective version of publishing for both print and the Internet during the exposition's opening keynote. Both Adobe executives stressed that publishers in the near future

Despite falling just a month after IPEX in England, this year's show drew more than 44,000 visitors—and the vendors didn't let them down. When graphic arts industry representatives from all over the world arrived in Chicago for Graph Expo recently, Xeikon decided to shock them a little bit. At a press conference, the Belgium-based digital color press manufacturer contended that digital color production costs are now comparable with offset at runs of 1,000 units or more. Based on a study Xeikon had commissioned, which used real costs and time factors in actual production environments, the company insisted that digital color presses have