EskoArtwork

alabama TUSCALOOSA—Printing Services at the University of Alabama has purchased a Presto saddle stitching system from Muller Martini to expand its full-service finishing capabilities. florida HIALEAH—Franklin/Trade Graphics recently held an open house to celebrate the one-year anniversary of the merger of Franklin Graphics, Trade Litho and Little River Press. About 200 guests got a look at the company's two new six-color, 40˝ sheetfed presses—a Mitsubishi 3F-13 and Mitsubishi Diamond 3000LS. Among the special guests at the open house were Stanley C. Panther, mascot of the Florida Panthers hockey team, and Billy the Marlin, mascot of the Florida Marlins baseball team. MIAMI—Solo Printing has

Lastra America has merged its Western Lithotech and Lastra America operations into a single business unit, Lastra America, headquartered in Danbury, CT. PagePath Technologies has, for a second time, received the Product of the Year award from the PrintImage International association, formerly the National Association of Quick Printers (NAQP). During the association's annual conference, PagePath was presented the award for its PDF2U Web-based orderflow system. xpedx Import Group, the exclusive Ryobi distributor in the U.S., has named Graphco, of Solon, OH, as its dealer for Ohio, Kentucky, West Virginia and Western Pennsylvania. Muller Martini has appointed Thomas Duckett as its New England sales manager. He now heads sales

VERNON HILLS, IL—Scheduling flexibility is what sets Aim Business Printers apart from other printers, asserts Richard Sussman, vice president and general manager. To support production of run lengths that vary from 500 to 1 million sheets, the shop installed a PlateRite 4000II thermal plate recorder and Trueflow PDF workflow from Screen (USA). It also implemented Screen's Spekta hybrid AM/FM screening technology. (www.screenusa.com) NORFOLK, VA—The Virginian-Pilot (daily circulation of 200,000 copies) has purchased two Polaris X violet-laser computer-to-plate platesetters from Autologic, an Agfa Co. (www.pilotonline.com/www.agfa.com) HOUSTON—Champagne Fine Printing is adding an HP Indigo digital printing press to assist clients in

PITTSBURGH—The Graphic Arts Technical Foundation (GATF) has announced the 13 recipients of the 2003 GATF InterTech Technology Awards. "This year's awards showcase the industry's growing attention to flexographic printing, ink-jet and soft proofing on a contract basis, and digital in-line finishing," says GATF Research Director John Lind. He also observed that automation combined with productivity and ROI continues to be a strong trend among the InterTech nominations. GATF has sponsored the InterTech Technology Awards as a service to the graphic communications industry since 1978. The 2003 award recipients are: Plate Cell Patterning, part of Artwork Systems' Nexus product family, is a software

VANDALIA, OH—The Association of Esko-Graphics Users recently held its annual meeting in St. Louis. A series of Adobe product and technology presentations met with considerable interest among attendees, as did the synergies afforded by the Esko-Graphics DeskPack solution released within the past year. The agenda covered a range of prepress topics and applications, including automated workflow, color theory, Internet proofing tools and alternative color models. (www.aeg.esko-graphics.com) PITTSBURGH—The Graphic Arts Technical Foundation (GATF) has published a report of the findings from its original research study comparing the quality of print jobs from digital color and DI presses. The print technologies used in

German Trainer Comes to Jersey WESTAMPTON, NJ—Dietmar Block, technical advisor from the Wohlenberg paper cutter factory in Germany, recently held a five-day, in-depth training course here at the headquarters of MBO America to help keep the company's technicians up-to-date on the latest paper cutting techniques. Komori America has consolidated the Komori HRB and Komori Midwest sales territories. Mike VanCalbergh, vice president of sales, Midwest region, now manages the new territory, which covers Illinois, Iowa, North Dakota, South Dakota, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Missouri, Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee and western Pennsylvania. Dr. Horst Steppat is now responsible for R&D and service at basysPrint in Germany. In his

STERLING, VA—Copy General, a chain of independent print shops in the Washington, DC, area, has purchased a Xerox DocuColor iGen3 digital production press. Management says the intent is to grow the organization's color production business from about 10 percent of total revenue today to 50 percent in 2004. (www.xerox.com/ www.copygeneral.com) ROCHESTER, NY—Presstek Inc. and Xerox Corp. announced the latter will no longer sell the DocuColor 233 DI-4, DocuColor 400 DI-4 and DocuColor 400 DI-5 presses and related consumables, all of which had been sourced through Presstek. Order taking for the products will cease immediately, but Presstek will continue to provide

Ricoh Corp. has aligned with UNIX and Linux software developer Codehost Inc. Ricoh will offer its customers and dealers BrightQT, Codehost's suite of Linux and UNIX-based printing tools, for use with Ricoh networked output devices. Creo Inc. has received ISO-14001:1996 certification for environmental management of its Canadian operations. This completes environmental management certification for both of the Creo design and manufacturing operations. Creo operations in Israel recently underwent recertification for ISO-14001—a standard first achieved in February 2001. KBA North America has promoted Evan Heise as its sales representative for a six-state region, including Montana, Utah, Wyoming, Colorado, Idaho and New Mexico. Heise is now

On Demand Show to Feature Allied Events NEW YORK CITY—Slated to run April 7-9 at the Jacob K. Javits Center, the 2003 edition of the On Demand Digital Printing and Publishing Conference & Exposition is being held in conjunction with two other events—the AIIM 2003 Conference & Exposition and TeleCon Collaborate 2003 Conference & Exposition. AIIM International is an association for the global enterprise content management (ECDM) industry and focuses on the technologies used to create, capture, customize, deliver and manage enterprise content to support business processes. TeleCon Collaborate showcases solutions that enhance productivity and performance within the enterprise, including videoconferencing, Web conferencing and

BY MARK SMITH Maybe the time has come to start an industry support group. "Hello. My name is Tom, and my print shop has yet to install a computer-to-plate system." Actually, a large number of U.S. printing companies are still making plates conventionally. There are perfectly valid reasons for not having made the move to CTP-based production, but probably not since high school have printing managers felt so pressured by the notion that "everyone is doing it." With some fits and starts, CTP has gone mainstream faster than many predicted. Today's buyers include shops on their second or third generation of technology, along with