Palo Alto, Calif. – Harte-Hanks, Inc., a leading provider of insight-driven multichannel direct and digital marketing services, recently installed an HP Indigo 7500 Digital Press to expand its print on demand service offering.

The new digital press provides high-end, offset-quality printing in an East Bridgewater, Mass., Harte-Hanks plant that produces marketing collateral for clients in the financial, retail, automotive, technology, pharmaceutical and other industries. The facility has had digital printing operations for more than 11 years, helping Harte-Hanks customers reduce waste and printing costs by replacing "pick-and-pack" warehousing with print-on-demand (POD) personalized and static collateral fulfillment.

Offset-quality printing brings more customers to POD

"Print-on-demand creates savings for our clients, and, as a result, that segment of our business is expanding, with color POD growing much faster than other offerings," said Phil Delaney, director, Print Services, at Harte-Hanks East Bridgewater. "We are finding that customers are interested in moving even more work from analog to digital printing because of the HP Indigo 7500's print quality."

Harte-Hanks is expanding the scope of what it offers in its POD operations, using the new press for some of its most challenging work, including jobs requiring heavy ink coverage, heavy solid colors, corporate spot colors and unique substrates.

High quality, and high value, with HP Indigo digital printing

The HP Indigo 7500 is HP's flagship sheet-fed press, offering true offset- and photo-quality imaging at speeds up to 120 four-color, letter-size pages per minute. Using HP's unique, PANTONE-licensed spot-color ink capabilities, Harte-Hanks' customers can obtain additional cost savings on two- and three-color jobs because the press prints those jobs at faster speeds, driving down the actual cost per print.

Harte-Hanks is taking advantage of the HP Indigo 7500's optional upgrade for printing thick substrates up to 400 gsm/460 microns, as well as its white ink option, which allows the company do full-color printing on clear, colored or metallized substrates.

"White ink is kind of a revolution for us because it is something most other digital devices cannot do today," said Delaney.

A 64-bit HP SmartStream Production Pro Print Server installed with the press integrates with Harte-Hanks' existing digital print workflows. The server also offers the processing horsepower needed to handle a growing volume of variable-data jobs originating from the company's proprietary, client-facing online order entry system.

Upgrading digital print to a high quality, high productivity standard

"The HP Indigo 7500 and HP SmartStream Production Pro represent the next progression forward as digital color printing matures into a high-productivity, high-revenue business at Harte-Hanks," said Jan Riecher, vice president and general manager, Graphics Solutions Business – Americas, HP.

The HP Indigo 7500 Digital Press is ideally suited to handle short- to medium-run length jobs as well as high-value applications, such as variable-data-driven marketing collateral, photo books and personalized direct mail.

The 7500 model offers Intelligent Automation features for high productivity through automated calibration and troubleshooting. A new Vision System solution on the press provides improved color quality and consistency. The press also uses less imaging oil and consumes up to 10 percent less energy per printed page.

More information about HP Indigo digital presses is available at www.hp.com/go/gsb or through the HP Graphic Arts Twitter feed.