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If you placed a new digital color copier/printer side-by-side with an early 90's era color copier, they would hardly be recognizable as the same type of device. In those days, color copiers blazed away at an amazing three to five pages per minute. The work tended to be family photos and the occasional pie chart and copies sold for $1 to $1.50 each. There were rumors that Xerox planned to introduce a color copier that output at 12 ppm.
The manufacturers kept assuring printers that there was a "pent up demand for color." There wasn't, of course, but as color became more affordable and the equipment became more sophisticated the demand for it did grow. Printers learned how to price and market the product to attract more lucrative business.
Digital color is so much a part of the quick printing landscape today that it is almost taken for granted. So, naturally, just when printers are getting comfortable with the process, the manufacturers have given us something new to chew on. And this time the advances promise to take digital color to places we never could have dreamed of 15 years ago. Today's offerings feature variable data capabilities, adjustable registration settings, and speeds that enable production-level output.
Branching Out
Monarch Graphics, a family owned print shop that has been serving Central Islip, NY, since 1978, was a beta test site for the Canon C7000VP. Vice president Robert Haller, Jr. says they were so impressed with the machine that they bought a production model when the beta testing was finished. "The color reproduction exceeded what we expected," he says.
Prior to installing the Canon in March, Monarch Graphics was an all offset operation, and trade work makes up a lot of its sales. "One of the reasons I never really had a color copier before this is because my customers have them," explains Haller. "With this I'm starting to get some of the work that's a little too much for their color copiers. Also short runs where I would have a lot of plates, like 24-32 page books that they want 150-200 of, would have been out of reach because of the plate costs. And we're even doing the mailings right on the saddle stitched pieces."
He points out that the variable data and barcoding capabilities of the equipment have opened up opportunities for the company to capture more work from existing customers and to reach out to new prospects. Additionally, with output sizes up to 13x19", the company was able to produce saleable posters for a local artist's gallery—another type of job the company wouldn't have accepted before.
"You can set it to get a higher intensity color than you can produce on the press," Haller points out. "You can get a wider color gamut or you can tone it down and profile it towards your press. You can get pretty close to what the press prints. The quality looks like the offset."
Adding the mailing and finishing options to the color device has made it even more productive, according to Haller. "We purchased PrintShop Mail software and Printable's Web-to-print solution, so we'll be going to San Diego for training on that. We're also going to be putting in some Duplo machines that will do the creasing and cutting automatically," he notes. "It's a little bit scary, actually. This is kind of like buying a pool. The pool is half the cost, then you have to put the landscaping around it. But I wouldn't have done it if I didn't believe the potential was there."
Top Quality
Peter & Maxine Derby are celebrating the 22nd year of owning and running Boston-based QPL Imaging. The company operates a Konica Minolta bizhub PRO 6500 and a bizhub PRO C500.
"What the new digital printers have allowed us to do is capture a lot of new business from customers. Today's customers aren't doing the long runs; they're doing a lot of shorter runs," Peter Derby observes. "And if they are doing longer runs, but they need something quickly, we can provide them with a short-run equivalent of the job while we're going to press with the longer run and it's perfectly satisfactory."
He says the last three to five years have seen a dramatic change in the work customers are willing to accept "I went through that transition when Xerox came out with the black-and-white copiers that were competing with the presses and people would insist on the press. Now people don't even ask, and it's the same with color," he says.
Another thing that he feels has contributed to the success of the newer digital color devices is their ability to feed heavier stocks. "They can feed a wider variety of stocks—100-pound covers and texts—and heavier stocks on occasion. But customers also are willing to take different weights that they wouldn't have taken before. The new machines being able to do stuff digitally, and shorter runs on different stocks have made a difference in our business," Derby states.
Growing Up
Lewis Creative Technologies in Richmond, VA, has been in business 85 years, so has weathered a number of changes in printing technology. Keith Bax, vice president of marketing, says, "We cut out teeth on color with a Xerox 2045 back in 2000. I wouldn't really categorize it as color copy work—we did have the ability to make copies off the glass—but it was digital work. Even way back in 2000, there was a certain amount of that which was very basic variable data work."
The company's impetus to move into digital color work was a combination of wanting to do personalization in conjunction with full-color, shorter run lengths, and proofing applications. "We were already doing lettershop work on a Xerox black-and-white device," he recalls.
Before long, the company moved up to a DocuColor 6060. "We were hoping that would be the solution to some of the challenges we were facing with the 2045. Things like color consistency, substrate latitude, registration, and speed," Bax says.
Unfortunately, the 6060 still didn't solve all the problems, so the company took the big plunge and bought two iGen3 digital color presses. "I'd say 85-90% of what we're doing on the two iGens we have now are personalized pieces," he states. That type of work has gone far beyond "Dear <your name>," to include image replacement and variable text blocks within documents.
Bax points out that when the company started out with the 2045, they were using a software authoring tool that wasn't terribly sophisticated. Switching to the Enterprise server-based version of the XMPie Personal Effects Suite released them from that limitation.
When he thinks about the future, Bax sees the print world becoming even more digital and more personalized. "Currency and relevance are characteristics that people are looking for in their printed work, and digital is a hand-in-glove fit with that," he says.
author: By Karen Lowery Hall