Hewlett-Packard

It was exactly a year ago that the drama began for Jack Williams. That's when the board of trustees at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, issued a directive to begin soliciting proposals from outside vendors for the possible outsourcing of his Graphic Arts Services operation.

Since overseeing the installation of a Presstek 34DI digital offset press last July, Al Goranson, manager of Imaging Services at the University of Colorado at Boulder, has achieved his goal of taking in more long-run, full-color work. “As our volume of four-color work continued to grow, especially in run lengths greater than 1,000, we needed something that could produce the work at a cheaper cost than our HP Indigo 3050 digital press,” recalls Goranson. “We had opportunities on longer runs that were just not economic to produce on the Indigo. That was why we chose the Presstek 34DI press.”

Dscoop is pleased to announce the addition of “Spark” sessions to its 2013 annual conference, scheduled to take place from Feb. 21-23 in Nashville. These optional sessions are intended to spark and motivate growth and change within digital print businesses.

HP announced the opening of an 118,000-sq.ft. ink manufacturing plant in Kiryat Gat, Israel. The plant will produce ink for the new generation of HP Indigo digital presses announced in May and is the first industrial building in Israel built to LEED standards.

Courier Corp., which specializes in book manufacturing, content management and publishing, plans to provide complete end-to-end digital production capability at its flagship four-color plant in Kendallville, IN. The heart of the new production line will be a high-volume HP T410 color inkjet web press, Courier's fourth HP digital press and its largest to date.

If anything, the emergence of eBooks as an über niche tucked inside the book publishing space has provided more opportunities for the printing community to show off its diversity to publishing clients. Some of the nation's largest book printers have dug deep into their coffers to fortify printing capabilities and capacity, a sign of health despite an economy that refuses to break into full recovery model.

Any printer that is able to experience modest growth, let alone stellar, certainly stands out in the sea of red ink, closures and bankruptcies that marked 2012. A small cadre of performers were able to do more than just survive.

The top new technology products in each of the Graph Expo 2012 Must See ’Ems categories were revealed at the close of the annual Executive Outlook conference that precedes the opening of the show.

At HP’s annual Securities Analyst Meeting this week, the company’s leadership mapped out strategic priorities for the future and provided a detailed roadmap to turn the company around.

Since installing a new 61˝ HP Designjet L26500 wide-format printer in July, Tiger Graphic Services, at the University of Memphis, has more than doubled its growth. While the 11-employee in-plant is still using its nine-year-old HP 5500PSUV printer, Manager Penni Istre says that the new device was necessary to produce the shop’s oversized and corrugated signage work, which makes up about 35 percent of its business.