Hudson, NH – Sept. 6, 2007 – Presstek, Inc, the leading manufacturer and marketer of digital offset printing business solutions, announces that the adoption of print services by the mail industry has created a new market opportunity for the company and presents an increased area of growth for Presstek’s Direct Imaging (DI®) digital offset product line into multiple print and mail facilities in North America.
With increased industry competition and the opportunity for new revenue streams, a variety of direct mail and marketing agencies have started to bring print services in-house to become single source suppliers – enhancing customer satisfaction and loyalty and yielding business growth.
Mail houses are looking for ways to differentiate their services, and this has created a new opportunity for easy-to-use DI presses, which offer high-quality, cost-effective and environmentally friendly offset printing. DI presses are highly automated, reducing both the skill level and the amount of labor required for press operators.
Presstek’s DI presses offer an ideal solution to help the mail industry be more capable, profitable and competitive and to develop new revenue streams. The DI press facilitates versioning, a process where high quality color shells are printed using a DI, and a toner-based device can be used to add personalized data, creating a more compelling piece at the lowest possible cost.
“Presstek is in a strong position to enter into new market segments by delivering superior quality, cost-effective, digital offset printing solutions that are easy to implement and use,” said Todd Chambers, chief marketing officer of Presstek.  “Presstek’s DI presses deliver high rates of return and increased efficiency to mail businesses seeking to expand their service offerings and develop new profit centers for their businesses. We are pleased to see the increased adoption of our DI solutions printing by print and mail businesses.”
Most recently, 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 portfolio of traditional print and mail services.
“To grow our business we decided to add digital printing services in order to provide a cross-functional, 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 to improve our basic customer service and revolutionize our business. The addition of the Presstek 52DI will take us to the next level of printing and direct mail services, enabling us to successfully do more business in an increasingly competitive industry.”
Other traditional mail businesses have turned to Presstek’s DI technology to increase their competitive advantage and expand their range of offerings. Advanced Direct Marketing in Loveland, Colo., which was founded as a mailing service, generates more than 7 million pieces of mail annually. Like many facilities, Advanced Direct decided to expand its business by bringing outsourced work in-house to offer a full range of printing and mailing services. Advanced Direct invested in a Presstek 34DI to efficiently produce the full range of work that customers were increasingly requesting and as a result, increased its printing output and has become more of a print shop than a mail shop.
“We discovered over the past few years that our customers prefer to deal with a single-source supplier for mailing campaigns, and rather than continue to outsource the printing aspect of the job, we decided it would be more efficient to bring the functionality in-house,” said Dennis DenBoer, owner of Advanced Direct Marketing. “By investing in Presstek’s DI press, we have been able to create new revenue streams and maintain more control over the quality and delivery of our customers’ projects.”
Carelton Communications, a 27-employee business, pioneered printing and mailing services in the Mechanicsburg, Pa. community and has been able to double its revenue in the past few years with the addition of a Presstek DI press. Carelton’s core business over the years has been government work, along with commercial print and direct mail services. Carelton added the Presstek 34DI to its facility as part of a strategic initiative to grow its business by efficiently producing short-run, quick turnaround four-color work.
“With our Presstek DI press, we are able to produce high-quality longer-run work that has taken our company to a whole new level and allowed us to attract new business,” said Chuck Rothstein, president of Carleton Communications. “We can now talk to our customers about digital offerings that deliver faster turnaround times with the highest possible quality at very competitive rates.”
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.  Presstek DI presses combine the versatility of offset with the convenience and ease-of-use of digital printing, creating superior image quality and reducing the environmental footprint because of the chemistry-free plates imaged directly on press in precise register. File to sellable sheet occurs in 10 minutes, allowing shops to easily compete in the short-run color print market and deliver four-color offset printing at a low cost per page in the fastest growing print segment of 250 to 10,000 impressions. The Presstek family of DI presses includes the Presstek 52DI, a landscape digital offset press that operates with a maximum page size of 20.47 x 14.76” – one of the largest print areas available in its class, and the Presstek 34DI, a portrait format digital offset press that produces up to 7,000 13.39 x 18.11” sheets per hour.