Texas In-plant Adds Five-color Press

It seems like the thing to do for in-plants these days: shut down your offset presses and swap them for toner-based printers. After all, long runs are a thing of the past, right?

Well that's not how The University of Texas at Austin sees things. The school's 51-employee in-plant has been outsourcing so much half-size four-color work in recent years that it recently made the bold move of installing a new five-color offset press. Since firing up the 24x29˝ Komori Lithrone SX29 press with a coater, the shop has been very busy printing large runs of brochures, post cards, maps, pocket folders and booklets—jobs it used to have to buy from commercial printers.

"Now we're going to become anywhere between 10 to 20 percent cheaper because I'm not paying the commercial markup," declares Director Richard Beto.

Read more about how the in-plant justified the new press in the February issue of IPG.