Boston-based BFS Business Printing recently acquired the fully automated, five-color Spica 529P perfecting press. Premier manufacturer of sheet fed and web offset printing presses Komori America Corporation announced this purchase as the first East Coast installation of the five-color Spica. This recent acquisition confirms the historic commitment of BFS to providing the latest print technology to the Boston community.

Founded in 1965, as a printer primarily servicing architects, engineers and developers, BFS is one of the last independent commercial printers remaining in the heart of Boston. During the 1970s, the company expanded and added a commercial offset printing division that continues to do well. BFS remains proactive in catering to the needs and challenges facing their growing client base by installing cutting-edge print technology and upgrading existing print media technology and applications.

The Spica 529P is flawlessly designed and streamlines traditional turnaround constraints of the offset printing process. In the current market, BFS is committed to personalized service and dedicated to exacting print media solutions to satisfy a wide range of customer demands. BFS is a mid-sized printer that faces the same challenges as their target competitors to keep pace with the changing market, but with fewer resources. Their management team is always looking to enhance business growth in the most efficient and cost-effective ways.

xpedx recently announced that it will open the Technology Center at its metropolitan Cincinnati headquarters to provide United States print professionals a single location where they can learn about, test and produce new equipment and technologies covering all aspects of offset and digital printing. The center is set to open in January 2009.

The xpedx Technology Center is the only one in the U.S. that gives printers the ability to evaluate products from multiple OEMs across all pre-press, press and post-press functions in a live print production environment. xpedx is a major supplier of equipment, software and consumables to North American commercial and in-plant printers. The Technology Center combines the company’s two print technology centers currently located in Cleveland, Ohio and metro Kansas City.

These centers are set to relocate to the Cincinnati center by year-end 2008. The Technology Center will be housed at xpedx North American headquarters and within International Paper’s global technology center. xpedx will leverage the printing and paper scientific and R&D expertise of International Paper. The new Technology Center will house pre-press and workflow technologies, offset and digital presses, as well as post-press/bindery equipment and technology. It will be staffed by expert service technicians who specialize in all aspects of printing.

Joseph Merritt & Co. has grown from a small blueprinting company in Hartford, Connecticut to a high-tech industry leader that prints board games and 90-foot banners. They have also scanned and indexed a historic journal from one of Charles Darwin’s trips to the Galapagos Islands in 20 minutes. They now operate from headquarters on Franklin Avenue and the company has 102 employees at eight offices in Connecticut, New York, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts.

Merritt have survived and been successful because of their ability to evolve and adapt to the demands of the marketplace and emerge as a national presence in graphics, printing, and information management. Ed Perry took over as president and CEO in 1987 and decided to take the company digital – this was virtually unheard of at the time in the printing industry as offset printing still dominated.

While many companies were reluctant to take the same risk, Merritt was well-positioned as the marketplace demand for digital printing increased. Since then, the company has grown and retooled with digital printing. Now, they can print 500 flyers cheaper than offset printing, which has seen a notable drop in business.

Presstek is a leading manufacturer and marketer of digital offset printing business solutions. They recently announced that New York-based Advanced Digital Printing acquired a second Presstek 52DI digital offset press, only seven months after buying the first one. They wanted to expand their production of packaging materials to encompass the additional printed material their customers require.

The larger format size of the 52DI press, combined with its ability to handle heavy stocks and its fast and efficient makeready, allowed advanced digital to significantly expand their product offerings and revenues. The company has also added conventional die-cutting to facilitate the production of packaging items produced on board stock, applications that can only be produced because of the DI press.

Presstek DI presses are the most efficient means of producing fast turnaround short-run, high quality color on a wide range of substrates. All plates are simultaneously imaged on-press, in precise register, and all the press comes up to color quickly. The DI’s waterless printing ensures fast drying and reducing water consumption, and its chemistry-free platemaking combined with reduced paper waste also ensures cost effective production.

The Xerox Corporation announced that Ifolor AG, a photo and print lab based in Kreuzingen, Switzerland, has agreed to buy multiple Xerox iGen4 Presses. Recently, Xerox has sold more than 300 digital systems and software. In addition to the iGen4 Presses, Ifolor has also upgraded three of its existing iGen3 Digital Production Presses with Xerox’s new Automated Color Quality Suite Press Matching System. This sale is one of the world’s largest orders to date for the Xerox iGen systems.

Ifolor AG specializes in the digital production of photos, posters, photo books, greeting cards and calendars and delivers them to customers in Switzerland, Germany, Norway, Sweden and Finland. The company will be one of the first print providers in the world to use the new Xerox iGen4 presses. The productivity of digital presses is a key factor to increasing print revenue. The iGen increases productivity by 25 to 35% by automating operator tasks, reducing the need to interrupt the press for adjustments and decreasing overall operating costs.

As a result, the iGen4 improves the break-even point between digital and traditional offset printing, making it faster and more economical to print jobs on digital.