Hewlett-Packard

GRAPH EXPO took over Chicago for four days last month, bringing the best of Drupa to U.S. soil. Thousands of printers turned out to see what the 600+ vendors had to show. They saw several striking changes from years past. For one thing, offset presses were not a dominant sight. Wide-open floor space typified the booths of many offset vendors. Even Heidelberg had just one press on hand, focusing instead on using Prinect to fully integrate a print shop. manroland showed no presses, but highlighted its service contract portfolios. This contrasted sharply with the booths of digital press manufacturers, which crammed as many

University in-plant managers gathered this past spring in Clearwater for the ACUP 2008 conference.

Remember those economic stimulus rebate checks we all got a few months ago? Most of us snatched them up with eager hands. But at the Congregation of St. Joseph, a religious community in La Grange, Ill., this free cash presented a small problem for the nuns living there. They have all taken a vow of poverty. After some discussion about whether or not to even accept the money, the Sisters decided it was their duty, as citizens, to spend this rebate and help stimulate the economy. So they decided to use it to help save the planet. “As a congregation, we decided

The third annual INTERQUEST Digital Printing in Government Forum is set to take place on Wednesday, November 5 at the Omni Shoreham in Washington D.C. Last year’s event drew about 150 attendees from more than 40 agencies and printing companies serving the government market. This year, INTERQUEST will present the results from a new study “Digital Printing in the Government: Market Analysis & Forecast (2008-2012),” which will be published in November. The study is based on an in-depth survey of government in-plant, CRD and data center operations. It analyzes market trends, issues, applications, and opportunities. The event will feature two customer panels, along with

Imagine this scenario: A pallet of books arrives at a distributor’s warehouse. It is scanned, allowing the system to keep track of the location of every book as the shipment is robotically de-palletized, stored and machine-prepared for shipment to retailers. Arriving at the point of sale, cartons are scanned at the door and all contents entered instantly into inventory, with special-order customers notified automatically that their book has arrived. Customers and employees can then discover with the click of a mouse exactly where a book is located in the store, and inventory, even at the largest bookstores, takes no more than 20 minutes.

Though its rural location is part of its allure, the University of North Carolina at Pembroke also has fewer choices when it comes to services. Knowing this, its three-employee in-plant has been striving to build up its printing capabilities. “We absolutely believe that we can provide any of the printing that any commercial printer can do,” proclaims Glenda Kiser, print supervisor. Two recent installations will help her prove it. The shop has added both a Canon imagePRESS C7000VP and an HP DesignJet Z3100ps wide-format printer. The imagePRESS C7000VP, one of Canon’s newest color devices, prints letter-sized jobs at 70 pages per minute, regardless

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.

Last month’s TransPromo Summit in New York was certainly upbeat in its predictions for this new marketing technique. Keynote Speaker Barb Pellow, of InfoTrends, pointed to data predicting a 68 percent compound annual growth rate for transpromo over the next four years. Most of the speakers backed this up with case studies and research indicating that customers are receptive to reading relevant marketing messages on their statements and bills. The 300 vendors, marketers and printers in attendance were certainly primed to hear this. They received numerous tips on how to initiate and carry out transpromo campaigns. Dozens of vendors were on hand to discuss

When the University of North Texas installed an HP Indigo 3050 a few years ago, it was a huge success. Almost too huge. “We’d migrated approximately 65 percent of our work over to the Indigo. Because of that...the number of orders caused us to have quite a backlog,” recounts Jimmy Friend, director of Printing/Eagle Images/Mail Services at the Denton-based university. “So we were bringing in staff at 5:00 in the morning and we were running continuously through the day. Then on some Saturdays we even had to come in.” All this overtime was getting costly. So Friend decided to eliminate it entirely by adding