Canon U.S.A.

With equipment specs, pictures and video all available online, why should an in-plant manager bother going to Graph Expo any more? Those who made the trip to Chicago last month have lots of good reasons.

Sure, in-plants know it's a good idea to benchmark their performance against other printers. But contacting and surveying those other printers is a lot of work. What if there was an online tool that would let managers plug in information and quickly see how they compare?

From Hollywood films to publishing and medical technologies, Canon U.S.A.'s new inspirational brand ethos spotlights the breadth of the company’s capabilities and contributions to developing imaging technologies that showcase the impossible for customers.

A new video from In-plant Graphics takes a look at the Graph Expo debut of the Performance Challenge, a new assessment tool from Canon Solutions America that benchmarks in-plants against industry standards. Dozens of in-plant managers packed the session to learn more about how the tool can help their operations.

The official numbers aren't in yet, but the crowds at this week's Graph Expo show in Chicago seemed larger than in previous years. Those who attended certainly had a number of new products to check out. Here are just a few of the new machines unveiled at Graph Expo.

Deep inside a nondescript, two-story brick building in the center of Helena, Mont., Ryan Betcher ruminates about the days when the state’s Print & Mail Services Bureau was filled with printing presses, running eight hours a day.

The in-plant at American River College produces one to two million impressions per month and serves a community college campus of more than 30,000 students. It does all this while constrained to 900 square feet.

Randy Patrick was fed up with wrestling with a folder that had been at his in-plant longer than he had. The rollers and wheels were worn, there were feeding issues and it was creating static on digitally printed jobs.

Salla Vaerma-Jadlos has helped lead ReproMail for the City and County of San Francisco through good times and bad. She's been at the in-plant for 21 years and has seen the department achieve success in uncertain times for the printing industry.

Growing up in Missouri with an interest in art and history, Michael Jaffe admits a career in the Northern California graphic arts scene wasn't his original plan.

"I just kind of fell into printing," quips the supervisor of the General Services Unit for the Judicial Council of California, in San Francisco.