Xerox Corp.

Xerox recently invited IPG to its Rochester headquarters to show off a host of new color and black-and-white products. by Bob Neubauer What's 30 feet long, 6-1/2 feet tall and very fast? The future, according to Xerox—or more specifically: the iGen3 Digital Production Press (formerly called FutureColor), the latest high-speed digital color printer from The Document Company. Xerox recently gave IPG a preview of some of the color and black-and-white technologies it will soon debut. Among them was the much-touted iGen3, first shown at Drupa last year. Outputting an impressive 100 pages per minute (ppm), at an expected cost of 5¢ per page,

"Out of sight, out of mind" is a dangerous place for an in-plant to be. Let your organization know what you do by holding an open house. I love open houses. The term itself evokes the ambiance of free food and fun, and I'm a strong proponent of both. I was attending an in-plant publishing department's open house a few years back, and a colleague who prepared the event was telling me that one of the benefits of having an in-house position was that he didn't have to worry about "selling." Trying to believe what I was hearing, I glanced over the richly

Many in-plants are requesting print vendors to provide solutions that include customized software addressing their specific needs. by Sam Errigo With the conversion to digital production printing systems, in-plant managers are finding that front-end software used to design and manage documents is critical to achieving efficient workflows. As a result, many in-plants are requesting—or in some cases requiring—print vendors to provide solutions that include customized software addressing their specific needs. In the past, customized solutions usually involved proprietary software and were often expensive to maintain and upgrade. Today, however, vendors can provide a customized solution by integrating existing, off-the-shelf software with their printing platform,

NexPress is ready to battle for business in the digital color printing arena with its NexPress 2100. by Mark Smith Rochester, N.Y., might seem an unlikely place to be ground zero in the next big battle for dominance of the digital color printing market. That is, until one takes into account the city is the corporate hometown of NexPress Solutions LLC (a Heidelberg/Kodak joint venture) and Xerox Corp. Print 01 brought a temporary shift in the battlefield to Chicago, setting up a head-to-head bid for attention between the NexPress 2100 and Xerox iGen3 (formerly FutureColor) digital presses. (For its part, Xerox contends that

Xerox has a lead with its DocuTech, but other vendors are successfully challenging it. In-plant users have strong opinions on the available machines. by Allan Martin Kemler Xerox has ruled the high-speed black-and-white digital printing world since it launched its DocuTech in 1990. So when Heidelberg, a giant in its own right, decided to step into the fray, everyone wanted to see what would happen next. What happened was Heidelberg partnered with Danka, Canon and IBM to sell its print engine to the world's print-on-demand customers as the Danka/Heidelberg Digimaster 9110, the Canon Imagerunner 110 and the IBM Infoprint 2000. Now, everyone wants

Digital printing has not replaced offset yet. But in-plants that have added digital gear say they can do certain jobs much more efficiently this way. We spoke with four in-plant managers about their digital printing capabilities. Becton Dickinson and Co. Printing Services Franklin Lakes, N.J. Office Services Manager: Michael Bekker (Michael_Bekker@bd.com) In-plant employees: 10 Annual operating budget: $1.55 million Main digital printing equipment: Xerox DocuTech 6180, Canon 2400. Jobs printed digitally: Price lists, training manuals, workbooks, correspondence, product catalogs, telephone directories. _________________________ University of North Carolina-Greensboro Graphics and Printing Greensboro, N.C. Director: Angela W. Schrock (angela_schrock@uncg.edu) In-plant employees: Four full-time, one part-time, four students

by Bob Neubauer As anyone with a printer or copier knows, equipment breaks down. So what's an in-plant to do if its DocuTech or 9110 goes down in the middle of a busy week? That's what Hal Cypert asked himself. "If you've got a fast-paced environment, sometimes you can't afford to be down for two or three hours, or overnight, if you're waiting on a part," notes Cypert, duplicating services supervisor for the County of Tulare, in Visalia, Calif. That's the main reason his 15-employee shop installed a T/R Systems Micropress instead of a DocuTech. "We did look seriously at the DocuTech," he admits.

The chocolate king's in-plant has done away with its DocuTechs in favor of clustered printers—and added a new folder and wide-format printer to boot. Hershey Foods Corp. is always moving forward. Whether increasing the size of its Kit Kat bar or expanding its visitors' center, Hershey's Chocolate World, the 118-year-old company never stops looking ahead. Its in-plant shares this philosophy. In recent years the 10-employee shop has acquired a five-color Shinohara press and an Encad wide-format printer, to name just a few additions. Now the Hershey, Pa.-based in-plant is at it again. The operation recently installed a new T/R Systems Micropress cluster printing system,

In 2001, ACUP headed to the Hollywood hills for a mixture of sun, education, camaraderie and just a touch of stardom.

What's the future of offset technology? Find out where direct imaging is taking it—and how presses may eventually shed plates altogether. Look at the trends: Shorter runs. Faster turnaround demands. Digital job data. Cut-throat competition. Many printers won't survive. Those that do will have to use new technology to heed these trends. That's where on-press imaging comes in. It offers everything today's business climate demands: Short-run efficiency, lower costs, faster makereadies and fewer steps. True, direct imaging (DI) is nothing new; Heidelberg introduced its GTO-DI in 1991. But DI quality has improved since then. New imaging systems from Presstek and CreoScitex have paved