DI Digital Offset Press Expands Printing Capacity

City Colors, a printer offering services to the trade, experienced such immediate value from its Presstek 52DI digital offset press that the company quickly installed a second new Presstek system.

City Colors, a printer offering services to the trade, experienced such immediate value from its Presstek 52DI digital offset press that the company quickly installed a second of the new Presstek system.

Miguel Infante, City Color's vice president, said: "Within 30 days of installing our first 52DI, it was clear that we would benefit from adding a second 52DI press.

We experienced tremendous benefits in increased quality, expanded production capacity, faster make-ready, automation and larger sheet size with the new press.

We have owned Heidelberg Quickmaster DI presses since 1998 and although two of these DI presses are paid for and functioning well, the decision to replace them with Presstek 52DIs was so obvious we quickly responded to the opportunity to expand our capabilities." Since the introduction of the first Presstek-enabled DI press to the market in 1991, Presstek said it has continued to apply advances to the imaging system and plates in DI presses to increase quality, whilst improving speed, reliability and overall price performance.

The latest generation DI press, the Presstek 52DI, images all four plates simultaneously on-press and outputs a 16micron spot with automated support for 300 lines per inch (lpi) printing and FM screening.

In addition, the press automatically adjusts the amount of ink according to the image on each plate.

All of that results in a make-ready time faster than other offset printing process, claimed Presstek.

File-to-sellable printed sheet occurs in 10 minutes and the DI prints up to 10,000 impressions per hour with a maximum image area of 20.07" x 14.17" per sheet.

In its DI operation, City Colors is primarily producing business cards and postcards for other printers.

Because the firm is running some 15 to 20 ganged jobs per day per press with an average run length of 1,000 impressions, Infante reported benefits from the increased quality and the larger sheet size, which enables more business cards or postcards to be produced in each job.

He commented: "Whilst we averaged 30 minutes per job on the Quickmaster we were only able to produce 150lpi printing.

With the 52DI, we are able to produce the same ganged run of 24 business cards in about 20 minutes, with virtually no manual intervention and with significantly higher quality at 300lpi." And Infante continued: "Saving 10 minutes per job doesn't sound like a lot, but with the volume we run per day, that saved time gives us the ability to run six to eight more jobs per week per press without adding shifts or personnel.

Furthermore, we can now produce as many as 10 additional jobs per sheet due to the larger 52DI sheet size.

And our customers are delighted with the improvement in quality of the printed output." Emile Tabassi, Presstek's vice president of North American sales, said: "City Colors was looking for a way to improve both the quality and productivity in its digital offset operation.

The Presstek 52DI not only increases the printable area per sheet by 20 per cent, the make-ready is twice as fast as its previous press at double the resolution, which results in higher quality.

Like other DI customers, City Colors has discovered that the 52DI is not only a press, it is also a business growth engine.".

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