Chicago - To meet the increasing demand from customers in global markets for high quality, locally produced materials, Consolidated Graphics, Inc. has completed upgrades of 19 KODAK NEXPRESS 2500 Digital Production Color Presses to the KODAK NEXPRESS SE3600 Press. CGX also purchased five additional NEXPRESS SE3600 Presses for operations in Prague, Czech Republic, and in Yokohama, Japan.

"More and more of our customers want us to produce product overseas that is consistent with the product we produce for them in the United States," said Ric Davis, Executive Vice President of Operations for CGX. "With the NEXPRESS SE3600 Presses, we can provide better customer service and shorter lead times, as well as lower shipping costs, by producing these print materials in the countries in which they are needed."\"We like the upgrades because we can produce more pages with the same number of operators in the same footprint," said Davis. "We are implementing the upgrades in stages. We have several presses in one building in each of our digital supercenters, so we keep running with functional presses while we take one or more presses offline for about a week to complete the upgrade. It's worked out very well."

Field upgradability is one of the most attractive benefits of choosing KODAK NEXPRESS Presses.

"Customers who already have KODAK NEXPRESS 2500 or 3000 Series Presses can see significant cost savings when they choose to upgrade to the NEXPRESS SE3600 Press," said Stephen Fletcher, General Manager, Electrophotographic Printing Solutions, Kodak. "The ability to upgrade these presses in the field provides customers with the most advanced features and the fastest speeds, without the downtime required to remove an older press and replace it with a new system. The price to upgrade is about 15 percent of the cost of a new press, protecting CGX's capital investment."

Not only does the NEXPRESS SE3600 Press upgrade increase capacity and speed for CGX, but it also includes the KODAK NEXPRESS Intelligent Calibration System (ICS), which increases productivity for commercial printers. Using ICS, CGX can capture and analyze color output and feed critical data back to the system for closed-loop calibration, delivering the dependable Pantone or PMS corporate color matching capability that CGX customers demand for worldwide distribution of their printed materials.

Much of CGX's business comes from customers who require variable data printing (VDP), Davis said.  "We aren't printing thousands of copies of the same thing," he said.  "Whether it's a photo book or a variable data product, every piece is personalized.  Variable data is driving the growth in the business."

The NEXPRESS SE3600 Press features KODAK NEXPRESS Digital Front End Software version 11, the first front end in the market with ADOBE PDF Print Engineer 2.0 for higher productivity and seamless workflow integration-particularly when implementing VDP capabilities. NEXPRESS System Software version 11 improves file processing significantly, providing the high level of accuracy required for VDP applications. The NEXPRESS SE3600 Press is the only sheet fed digital production color press to offer unconstrained 3600 A3+ sheets per hour, or 120 pages per minute.

Davis also points to the capabilities offered by KODAK NEXPRESS Fifth Imaging Unit Solutions, which allow users to add a variety of unique features inline during the printing process. For the SE3600 Press, Kodak's Fifth Imaging Unit Solutions offer clear coating, watermarking, glossing, protection coating, and color gamut expansion.

"The clear toner option and the dimensional printing capability are possible only with the NEXPRESS Press," Davis said. "With the right customer and the right requirements, these are good things to have."