Tuesday July 31 -- HUDSON, N.H., July 31 -- Presstek, Inc., the leading manufacturer and marketer of digital offset printing business solutions, today announced that Catawba Print & Mail, a leading North Carolina printing and direct mail facility, installed a Presstek 52DI digital offset press to expand its print offerings and add four-color digital offset printing to its catalog of traditional print and mail services.
"To grow our business we recently decided to add digital printing services to provide a turnkey print and mail package for our existing mailing customers," said L.F. Miller, president and owner of Catawba Print & Mail. "We selected Presstek's 52DI, which allows us to provide superior digital offset printing. Its high-level of automation, 300 lpi printing and 52 cm format enable us to deliver unsurpassed speed and quality, ultimately helping us improve our basic customer service. The addition of Presstek's 52DI will enable us to revolutionize our business and will take us to the next level of printing and direct mail services, enabling us to successfully do business in an increasingly competitive industry."
Catawba offset prints thousands of 4x6 postcards that are then messaged and addressed using its inkjet equipment. With the Presstek 52DI, Catawba is able to print the cards four-up, full-bleed, with the first cards off the press and ready for addressing in 10 minutes, reducing the turnaround time to three days on average, vs. five to seven days with conventional presses. Understanding that it was not cost or time efficient to print these pieces on its existing digital toner press, Catawba selected the Presstek 52DI because it eliminated the complexity, training and space requirements associated with conventional offset printing and offline platemaking.
"Catawba is at the forefront of an increasing number of print and mail houses that have started to expand their service offerings to include digital offset printing, representing a tremendous new market opportunity for Presstek," said Todd Chambers, Presstek's chief marketing officer. "The benefits of the DI help print and mail vendors create an entirely new profit center with the ability to control all print jobs to include an extensive line of high-quality marketing, direct mail and advertising print solutions."
Since the introduction of the first Presstek-enabled DI press, Presstek has continued to apply innovative advances to the imaging, plate and press design in DI presses, creating an optimized printing solution that increases quality, while improving speed, reliability and overall price performance. The latest generation DI press, the Presstek 52DI, images all four plates simultaneously on-press in precise register and outputs a 16 micron spot with automated support for 300 lpi and FM printing. In addition, it automatically adjusts the amount of ink according to the image on each plate. All of this results in very high-quality output and a makeready time significantly faster than other offset printing processes. File-to-sellable printing sheet occurs in 10 minutes, and the DI prints up to 10,000 impressions per hour with a maximum image area of 20.07 x 14.17 inches per sheet - one of the largest print areas available in its class.
"Catawba is expanding its business and capitalizing on its well-established customer-base by providing next-generation digital printing services," said Emile Tabassi, Presstek's vice president of North American sales. "Our DI presses are taking Catawba to a higher level of commercial printing by improving its profitability, quality and competitiveness."