Florida School Draws Inspiration From PRINTING United Expo

When Marcus Green, printing technician for Orange County Public Schools in Orlando, Florida, first saw the HP Latex 630 W at PRINTING United Expo 2023, he couldn’t help but feel like it was a match made in heaven.

“It honestly seemed like they were making that machine for us,” Green says. “And the reason I say that is because it wasn’t as heavy duty as some of the other machines because we really don’t have a reason for purchasing $100,000 large-format printer. The HP 630W just all-around seemed much more user-friendly and more our speed.”

After about a two-year process of finding the right vendor and asking all the right questions, the in-plant installed its 630W in June 2024 and has pretty much hit the ground running. Green says the in-plant hasn’t begun a full roll-out of its new capabilities, but it has gotten numerous wide-format jobs through word of mouth.

“In the past, we normally would go out to vendors to get certain things like banners and signs printed, but now we can print it in house,” he says. “So, what we’ve been doing is taking some of those jobs and just printing them in-house rather than sending them out for bid, just to see how the print quality was going to be for our customers, and they’ve just been ecstatic about it.”

The in-plant didn’t stop at the HP 630W, though. At both the 2023 and 2024 PRINTING United Expos, he and his team came across technologies they wanted to implement.

“Every year we found something that we need to add to our arsenal to help move us forward, and a lot of things that we’ve bought have opened doors to other things,” Green says.

Some of the other machines the team saw at the 2024 Expo and later purchased include a Triton 120 cutter, a Revo Flex automatic laminator, and a Hemtek ST 30 welding machine. Green describes them as the “bells and whistles that come along with wide-format.”

Adding the HP Latex 630 W made Green and his team re-evaluate how they could automate other processes in their in-plant – and seeing certain technologies at the Expo made them stop and realize they actually needed that equipment as opposed to merely wanting it.

“We weren’t even in the market for a hemmer, but with large-format, you want to make sure you get everything that you need, and we figured this is something else where we can automate a process, because when you’re dealing with large-format, very rarely are you going to find a job where it won’t be easier to have two people,” he says. “So, we needed something that was going to be that extra set of hands, and we were just passing by, and we were looking, and we were just like ‘Wow, this is this is actually pretty neat.’”

And considering Green and his team are responsible for printing materials for more than 240 schools across the Florida district, automation is key.

“At times it’s very hard to keep up with workflow, and we have to be doing more than one thing at a time given the fact that we’re such a small crew,” Green says. “We can’t just stand by the machine; we have to be doing multiple things. And for us the Revo Flex covers the gamut of the majority of the jobs that we do and helps free up some time.”

When it comes to this year’s PRINTING United Expo (Sept. 22-24) in Orlando, Florida, Green says he couldn’t be more excited to have the show right in his backyard, giving him the opportunity to bring the whole team.

He says they’ll be on the lookout for production equipment, and even possibly an inkjet press. The in-plant, he says, is looking to make the leap to inkjet so it can eliminate black-and-white and print entirely in color for about the same cost of printing jobs in greyscale.

“Students learn better in color, they learn better with nice pictures, and we want to be able to do that for them, all the while making sure everything is legible and it actually looks pretty decent – and we’d still be printing at a fraction of the cost,” Green says.

In-plants that haven’t been to PRINTING United yet are missing out, he says.

“In-plants are a very niche type of print shop when it comes to the industry as a whole, and a lot of times we can get left out of things,” he notes, “and I feel like … no matter what’s going on in the industry, if it’s not at PRINTING United, it’s probably not relevant.”