Océ North America, Production Printing Systems

BOCA RATON, FL—December 19, 2006—Océ (NASDAQ: OCENY), a global leader in digital document management and delivery solutions, announces that an Océ customer, the International Center for Entrepreneurial Development (ICED), has made the shift from offset outsourcing to in-house digital color, resulting in better support for their franchise network through more effective personalized mailings. Along with the convenience of web-based submission and the relevance of targeted personalization, this enhanced business model lets ICED offer more value-added services to their network to help franchise center owners grow revenue while reducing costs and improving targeting. ICED is one of the largest alliances of print and copy, pack and

LAVERGNE, TN—Lightning Source Inc. (LSI), the leading provider of demand-based book manufacturing and distribution solutions to the book industry, has acquired 15 new state-of-the-art Océ printing presses. “This is a significant investment in our quality, our customers, and our future,” J. Kirby Best, President and CEO of Lightning Source Inc., said today. The new equipment, which will bring Lightning customers dramatically enhanced graphic and halftone capability, is the Océ VarioStream® 9210 black and color ready digital printers. Lightning Source has begun installing the new presses at its printing facilities in both the United States and United Kingdom. The installation process is expected to be

BOCA RATON, FL—October 4, 2006—Océ (NASDAQ: OCENY), a global leader in digital document management and delivery solutions, announces that Océ CPS color customer, One to One Gulfcoast, was honored with a first place award in the 2006 Gold Awards for Fundraising Excellence, sponsored by Fundraising Success magazine. The One to One Gulfcoast entry, “Out-of-Door Academy Annual Fund, “ took First Place in the Renewal (fewer than 50,000 mailed) category and tied for Third Place for Package of the Year. “These are perhaps the most prestigious awards given for fund raising campaigns as judged by an independent third party,” said Brian Weiner, president of

ALL ROADS lead to the Windy City for our industry’s biggest annual confab, Graph Expo, this month. Although you might be reading this issue of Printing Impressions just after the event—or perhaps on your way to the show—most pundits predicted that the overriding themes for this year’s edition would be digital printing and workflow. Large exhibits from companies like Xerox, Kodak, H-P, Xeikon and Océ will surely be bustling with show floor traffic. Printers who have already entered the digital printing realm will be crowded shoulder-to-shoulder within these booths with those still pondering whether to make their initial leap. Some show-goers will just

FOR A time, it seemed as if the only point of distinction in digital printing was the simple fact of it being digital. The term became virtually synonymous with short run, quick turnaround printing, maybe with a little variable data work thrown in. Companies looking to invest in digital printing services typically evaluated the full range of equipment options available, a trend that continues today. At first blush, all the machines seem more alike than different—in terms of format, speed, resolution, etc.—and are capable of getting the job done. Some vendors like the connotations—solid, durable, productive—of the “digital press” designation. Other have opted to

PHILADELPHIA—The City of Brotherly Love’s two-year run in hosting the AIIM and ON DEMAND expos came to an end yesterday with the conclusion of the technologies show at the Pennsylvania Convention Center. The event will move to the Boston Convention & Exposition Center next spring, April 17-19, 2007. The show’s producer, Questex Media Group, is based in Newton, MA. As for the ON DEMAND Conference and Expo, it handed down Best of Show awards in six general categories. Standard Finishing Systems won in the bindery and finishing equipment category for its Standard Horizon BQ-470 perfect binder. Océ North America pulled down top honors in the

Xerox iGen3 Dedicated at PIA/GATF SEWICKLEY, PA—The Printing Industries of America/Graphic Arts Technical Foundation (PIA/GATF) will now be able to take part in Xerox’s “New Business of Printing” thanks, in part, to Xerox’s recent donation of an iGen3 110 Digital Production Press at its headquarters here. PIA/GATF will use the new digital press for production, research and training purposes. Also donated as part of the installation were a Bourg Book Factory from C.P. Bourg and Press-sense’ iWay business workflow solution. Océ Hosts Open House POING, GERMANY—Mix in one part sausage, two parts sauerkraut, three parts Pilsner, and you have a typical German night

BY MARK SMITH Technology Editor One of the most striking trends to take shape at PRINT 05 & CONVERTING 05 is the degree to which one can now play a "zero degrees of separation" game between vendors of digital printers and prepress workflow systems. Some level of cross-linking seemed to be announced for almost every possible pairing. (More details are included in the "Prepress Workflow and CTP" show recap on page 28.) In terms of the print engines themselves, developments appear to have at least temporarily hit a plateau. The pieces required to build a viable business are already in place, so the focus

By Erik Cagle Senior Editor Digital printing, by all accounts, isn't what it was even two years ago. Likewise, any similarity between today's digital printing presses/output devices and short-term future technologies will be purely coincidental. Scratch that last statement, for there's one notable exception: the quality of digital printing already has improved and is certainly on the fast track to mainstream acceptance for any type of job, not just those pigeonholed as "digital friendly" applications. More commercial applications are continuously being realized. The masses have certainly gotten that point and are mobilizing the back end of the operation with equipment geared toward the finish

BY MARK SMITH Technology Editor It’s been more than a decade since the first high-volume, modern digital color printing systems were introduced. Heidelberg and Presstek teamed up to launch the digital offset (GTO DI, in this case) product category in 1991. A few years later, the Indigo EPrint and Agfa/Xeikon Chromapress ushered in the era of the all-digital production color printing systems. In the future, though, 2004 may be looked back upon as a key transition period in the maturation of digital printing as a business segment—both on the vendor and user side. No fundamentally new technologies were unveiled, but all the vendors