New Gear Lifts Palm Springs In-plant

When Drone Fest comes to Palm Springs, California, each May, thousands of visitors descend on this desert town for two days of drone races, aerial shows, and drone soccer competitions. Instrumental in guiding those visitors through the site are the scores of signs printed by Palm Springs Unified School District’s Mail and Reprographics team.

The new Canon Arizona 1360 GT flatbed printer at Palm Springs Unified School District Reprographics

This year, the four-employee shop had just a week to turn around numerous parking, directional, and scoreboard signs for the event, which drew visitors from around the world.

“It was pretty hectic,” reflects Supervisor David Monay. “But because of the new machines, we were able to deliver … a day early.”

Those new machines are a pair of Canon wide-format printers: an Arizona 1360 GT flatbed and a Colorado M5 roll-to-roll printer. They were part of a massive equipment overhaul at the in-plant that brought in a variety of new devices in recent months:

• A Kyocera TASKalfa Pro 15000c inkjet press
• A Riso Valezus T2200 dual-engine inkjet press
• A Riso ComColor GL9730 inkjet press
• Four Canon varioPRINT 140 digital printers
• Two Canon imagePRESS V1350 digital color presses
• A Canon Titan black-and-white press
• A Standard Horizon BQ-300 perfect binder linked via a conveyor to an HT-300 three-side trimmer

Palm Springs Unified School District’s new Kyocera TASKalfa Pro 15000c inkjet press was part of a massive equipment overhaul at the in-plant that brought in a variety of new devices.

Installed in February, the Kyocera and Riso inkjet presses replaced a Xerox Baltoro, a move that saved the district money, improved print quality, and eliminated persistent reliability and environmental issues.

“The click rate is so much lower,” says Mail/Reprographics Technician Mike Sloan. “Supplies were definitely a lot cheaper.”

He praises the quality of the Kyocera and Riso output, saying there is no longer any banding on the flyers, newsletter, report cards, and other items the shop prints. The new inkjet devices are also more compact and energy efficient than the Baltoro, he adds, and not as sensitive to humidity as the Baltoro, which was also prone to curling and jamming issues.

“If we’re doing 2,000 flyers for an event, it’s just more cost effective and quicker to run these things [on an inkjet press] because they’re just a lot faster than our toner-based machines,” Sloan says.

The new Canon Colorado M5 roll-to-roll wide-format printer helped the in-plant produce scores of signs for Drone Fest in May.

Though the in-plant ran curriculum materials on the Baltoro, which had an in-line C.P. Bourg BM-e finisher, he says it is not yet doing that on the new inkjet equipment because it lacks in-line finishing. Once a new Horizon SPF-2000 bookletmaker is installed, he adds, curriculum materials will move to the inkjet presses. Curriculum is currently being run on the Titan, which Sloan calls a “workhorse.” It has an in-line saddle-stitcher.

The new Standard Horizon perfect binder and three-side trimmer line have brought new efficiency to the shop, he says. The equipment is used to bind yearbooks, art books, summer schoolbooks, and other publications too thick to saddle stitch.

“We used to have to trim the finished book by hand,” Sloan says. “Having a conveyor that does everything pretty much in-line is definitely convenient when we’re limited in staff.”

As for why the in-plant got so much new equipment in such a short timeframe, Sloan says it was mostly because leases were all coming to their ends, but also because the shop wanted to become more productive and efficient.

The Canon Colorado and Arizona wide-format printers at Palm Springs USD.

“The machines that we were working with were at 50% capacity,” he notes, “so having the new equipment is definitely going to [reduce] downtime.”

It has also brought new capabilities. The new Canon Colorado M5 and Arizona 1360 GT wide-format printers add the ability to print spot colors and varnish, which Monay says is essential in sunny Southern California.

“Anything that’s exposed to the outside, with the sun out here in the desert, varnish is a good option to keep the inks from fading,” he says.

Those printers certainly improved the quality of the signage for Drone Fest, and enabled the shop to print them much faster than the previous wide-format printers could.

“The Canon machinery is so quick that we can pump out banners all day,” Monay praises.