PALO ALTO, California, October 13, 2008 – HP today announced that Integrated Book Technology is installing an HP Indigo 7000 Digital Press. With the press, IBT will expand its print production operations to pursue greater profit opportunities, leveraging the press' exclusive capabilities for Pantone-licensed spot color printing, higher-speed one- and two-color printing, and compatibility with thinner and lighter-weight media.

The company, a leading producer of science, technical and medicine (STM) journals, scholarly monographs and educational materials, purchased the press at the drupa trade show in Germany, and is installing the press at its Troy, N.Y., headquarters. 

"The significant competitive advantages possible with the HP Indigo 7000 are making it a popular choice for customers who, like IBT, saw it first-hand at drupa." said Jan Riecher, vice president and general manager, Americas Graphics Solutions Business, HP. "These customers will benefit from high productivity and reliability, streamlined HP SmartStream workflows, and cost-saving features, such as the ability to print using a true spot color rather than a more expensive process-color match."

IBT, which previously used an HP Indigo press to print four-color covers, will now produce four-color, two-color and monochrome work on the HP Indigo 7000, leveraging the new press' speed and reliability, as well as the throughput-enhancing workflow offered with the HP SmartStream Production Pro Print Server.

"In the marketplace we serve, it is really a 40/60 or 50/50 mix in terms of two-color and four-color production, and the HP Indigo 7000 allows us to meet all of those production needs in high-volumes," said Bill Clockel, chief technology officer, IBT. "HP Indigo quality is well-known --- it really delivers what our customers are looking for – and the flexibility and productivity are better than anything else we've seen in the marketplace."

Announced at drupa, the HP Indigo 7000 Digital Press prints120 pages per minute (ppm) and, unlike digital presses from other vendors, it prints at a faster speed – 240 ppm – in two-color mode.

Compatibility with the medias that make STMs profitable

IBT, which serves leading publishers such as John Wiley & Sons, Taylor & Francis, and many other publishing entities, relies heavily on the ability to use specific media that are essential to the creation of its products. Many of the titles IBT produces are high-page-count books that must be printed on thinner, lighter-weight media that yield high page-per-inch counts. The HP Indigo 7000 meets this critical market requirement, printing on a range of lighter-weight medias commonly used in elementary-through-high school (EL-HI) publishing and higher education publishing, such as 45-pound uncoated text.

The HP Indigo 7000 offers several benefits in IBT's binding operation as well. On competing digital presses, the level of toner build-up on an imaged page can create a variance in overall thickness of a book or journal that makes it more difficult to bind. By contrast, the thin ink layer from HP Indigo's liquid electrophotography printing process ensures consistency on high-page-count documents for easier postpress processing.

"We've seen variations of as much as 1/8" between the top and the bottom of a book that is printed with dry toner," said Clockel. "That's a problem we don't have with the liquid HP ElectroInk."

Designed to produce up to 3.5 million four-color A4/letter-size pages per month with true offset and photo quality, the new HP Indigo 7000 Digital Press offers a powerful combination of speed, productivity and quality with its faster printing speed of 120 ppm and its higher breakeven point with offset. The HP Indigo 7000 Digital Press is optimized to print 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.