New Digital Press Brings Inline Bookletmaking to Gannon

When the three-year lease was up on the Xerox 700i at Gannon University Press, Supervisor Patrick Celline decided it was time to get a device that would meet the university’s booklet finishing needs. So early this year, the Erie, PA, in-plant installed a Konica Minolta bizhub PRESS C1070 with an inline bookletmaker, and is now producing short-run booklets without the need for off-line finishing.

“We do have a booklet finisher off-line for our offset department. A lot of the time we would have to run single sheets and then take them back to the other department for assembly into a booklet,” reveals Celline.

Not anymore, though. Thanks to the C1070’s inline booklet finisher, books come off the press as finished products, saving lots of time, Celline reports.

The new 70-page-per-minute digital press accepts paper sizes up to 13x19.2˝ and weights up to 300 gsm. Two high-capacity feed trays were added to the mix to help free up the hands of the five employees working in the plant.

“In the new machine we can literally put in 2,500-3,000 sheets of 80-lb cover of 13x19˝ and it will run continuously, where before we would have to continue to feed that small bypass tray,” Celline says.

Freed from this task, employees can now get more work done, he says. “We can send a job from a desktop and go into the back room and burn plates … and come back when the job is complete,” Celline observes. “[Operators] don’t have to babysit the job.”

For four-color jobs of more than 500-700 impressions, the in-plant turns to its Heidelberg QM DI press. For short runs, however, the C1070 gets the job done. It features a 15˝ color touch-screen display, 1,200x1,200-dpi resolution and maximum capacity of 7,500 sheets. It uses Simitri HD polymerized toner, which offers low-temperature fusing.

All in all, the transition to the C1070 seems to have gone well for the shop’s operators.

“[It was] a little daunting at first,” admits Celline, “but … there wasn’t any significant downtime. It is a quality machine.”

The in-plant has also recently upgraded its bindery by adding a Duplo 5000 booklet making system and a Rosback 223 perforator.