PALO ALTO, Calif. -- HP today announced that Smith Litho has enhanced its offset-quality digital color production printing offerings with the installation of an HP Indigo 7000 Digital Press and the HP SmartStream Production Pro Print Server.

With the new seven-color press, which joins an HP Indigo press 5000 already in operation at the firm, Smith Litho has established a continuous range of offerings for nearly any print need between its digital and offset operations, including personalization, high-quality sheetfed digital and offset printing and heatset web offset printing.

The HP Indigo 7000 helps Smith Litho provide greater value to customers seeking to broaden their range of print marketing materials. Based in Rockville, Md., the company specializes in direct mail, marketing collateral and other high-quality commercial print products for customers in the metropolitan Washington, D.C., area and the broader mid-Atlantic region.

"With its new press, Smith Litho is capturing a full range of capabilities that allows them to meet customer demand for lower cost solutions at longer run lengths," said Jan Riecher, vice president and general manager, Americas Graphics Solutions Business, HP. "HP Indigo technology and its unique liquid HP ElectroInk are key to HP's commitment to customer success as they enable established PSPs to stand out by integrating true offset-quality digital printing with their existing offerings."

The new press will also help Smith Litho continue to accelerate the success of its existing web-to-print offering, based on connections between the firm's existing production workflow tools and the HP SmartStream Production Pro Print Server.

Indigo quality makes a difference in today's marketplace

Smith Litho selected HP after conducting extensive research on digital production press solutions available today.

"We were able to see how well the HP Indigo 7000 prints, and we have confidence in the technology and what it enables us to do for our customers," said David Uslan, chief marketing officer, Smith Litho. "There's a distinct advantage in quality with HP Indigo digital presses using liquid ink instead of dry toner, and we know it makes a difference for a client base that demands and deserves offset quality at the best possible prices."

Launched at drupa 2008, the next-generation HP Indigo 7000 Digital Press delivers faster production speeds of 120 high-quality four-color A4-size pages per minute. Designed to significantly increase the break-even point of digital compared with offset, the HP Indigo 7000 is an ideal press for the production of large numbers of static jobs with run lengths ranging from one copy into the thousands, as well as variable-data work requiring the "every page is different" capabilities of digital.

The HP Indigo 7000 also offers the widest digital color gamut available with 4-, 6- or 7-color PANTONE-licensed emulation including Pantone Goe, as well as off-press mixing of true spot colors. In addition, the HP Indigo 7000 Digital Press incorporates HP DreamColor Technologies, a certified system of color technologies and sciences that makes it easy to produce accurate, predictable and consistent color across a series of digital color devices.

The HP SmartStream Production Pro Print Server is a high-performance raster image processor (RIP) and press controller for handling large-volume and complex variable-data jobs on HP Indigo digital color production segments, including general commercial print applications, direct marketing and publishing. This off-press solution connects to print service providers' management information systems (MIS), taking workflow tasks out of the press room and putting them in the prepress environment where they can be efficiently and centrally managed.