Last June, Rochester, N.Y., hosted the 16th Xerox Rochester International Jazz Festival. The week-long event drew more than 205,000 music aficionados from around the world to hear 1,500 artists at 19 venues around the city. One featured attraction at the festival was not a musician, but rather a printing device: event sponsor Xerox was using its new Direct-to-Object Printer to produce customized souvenirs of the event for attendees—notebooks, water bottles, plastic wine glasses, and golf balls could be personalized with a name or pithy saying.

“People were actually taking movies of [the printer],” said Karl Dueland, Vice President and General Manager, Xerox. “Not only did they give the personalized objects as gifts, but then they showed the recipients the movie.”

The Direct-to-Object Printer is The Document Company’s first foray beyond documents into the direct-to-object space, although the company has been offering customized direct-to-object printing solutions to individual customers for a number of years. The Direct-to-Object Printer, which launched last year, is an inkjet device that uses UV-cured ink (although it can also support other kinds of specialty inks, such as aqueous or solvent). It comes in CMYK plus white ink, and can support up to 10 total channels, including special inks such as brand or specific PANTONE colors, overcoats, and primers. It can print on a three-dimensional object up to one cubic foot in size. The machine itself is designed to have a small footprint. The front end uses XMPie (a Xerox company) for personalization. It also features a large window so that onlookers can watch the item being printed—which, as Xerox found at the jazz festival, was a large part of the device’s appeal.