Digital Digest

"We had been struggling in screen printing," noted Bill Gillespie, vice president of printing operations for Brown Industries. "We hired a consultant who advised us that 80 percent of what we were printing belonged on equipment that we didn't have."

Naturally, several guests peppered the printer panel with ROI questions. One company wrote its machine down in four years. For justification, another recommended running business equivalent to four to five times the cost of the machine. Still, one printer pointed out the danger of number crunching, stressing that pricey substrates can account for the lion's share of the cost of a wide-format job.