Salt Lake City, UT; February 27, 2001-Rastar Digital Media, one of the country's leading digital prepress service providers with 80 employees, $9 million in sales and a blue-chip client roster, has installed a 74 Karat(TM) press from Karat Digital Press to extend the range of its services to a market "screaming for high quality, short run printing." Rastar is a digital media company, providing expert digital prepress, photography and printing services to two types of clients - large, geographically dispersed corporations, and smaller corporations, printers, advertising agencies and graphic design firms. Rastar installed the 74 Karat press in January 2001 to augment its variable-data digital printing operation comprised of two ChromaPress units and an Indigo TurboStream. The press will allow Rastar to tap into a burgeoning market for short-run offset printing, according to Rastar Executive Vice-President Jim Carroll. The 74 Karat is a compact, waterless and keyless, 4-color digital offset press with a 20 by 29-inch (4-up) format. The 74 Karat can run more short- and medium-run jobs per shift than conventional offset presses, and with considerably less operator effort. It can be easily integrated into today's digital workflows, thereby combining the power of full digital production with the high quality of true offset printing. The use of waterless ink and its keyless, self-calibrating Gravuflow(TM) inking system were key contributors to Rastar's 74 Karat purchase decision, said Carroll. "We're maniacs about color and we're a digital shop to the core, so we need a press that fits into our workflow and delivers high-quality results with minimal operator involvement. The 74 Karat lets us dial up the color matched to our Iris or Creo TrendSetter. Makeready takes 17 minutes, and in ten sheets we're up to color and running the job. There's no water and no ink keys to monkey with."