What’s in the
building.
Prepress, presses, bindery and mailing, by department, in the order a job moves through the shop. Makes and models change; if your piece needs a particular press or sheet size, ask when you quote and we will confirm it.
How to read an equipment page
The press a job runs on decides what it costs; the machines behind the press decide how many times it has to be picked up, boxed, driven somewhere and unpacked again. Both of those end up on the invoice.
The machines worth knowing about
- Folders with right-angle units — straight, parallel, double parallel, letter and Z folds, and more than one fold in the same pass.
- A saddle stitcher that collates, stitches and trims in one pass.
- Programmable cutters, driven cut to cut, so a sequence repeats exactly instead of being reset by hand between cuts.
- An ink-jet addressing transport that wafer-seals in line with addressing, rather than as a second handling.
- An inserter that fills envelopes by machine.
Those five are the reason a booklet or a mailing does not need a second vendor part way through — see bindery and direct mail.
Why the small presses are on the list too
The smaller one and two color presses and the envelope feeders are there so a simple job on a small sheet does not have to tie up a multi-unit press: less make-ready, less waste, less cost. The digital presses print with no plate at all, which is what makes a run of a hundred worth doing (digital printing). And the plates the offset presses do use are metal, and get reused rather than thrown out (offset printing).
Three things the list is telling you
Process and spot, in one pass
A press with more than four units lays the four process colors plus a spot ink in one pass, in register, so a brand color sits exactly right beside a photograph. Which press a given job goes on follows from its sheet size, color count and quantity — which is why the quote form asks for all three.
Direct to plate, no film
Plates are imaged straight from the file on the platesetter. No film to shoot, strip or store — one less generation between your artwork and the plate, and one less place for a fault to appear.
Finishing under the same roof
Folders, a saddle stitcher, coil binders, drills and programmable cutters sit on the same floor as the presses. The job does not leave the building to be finished, so there is one schedule to keep instead of two.
Describe the piece and the quantity and we’ll tell you which press and which bindery machine it runs on, and what that costs.
A list of machines looks like trivia until you are pricing a job, at which point it is the whole answer.
The full list.
Five groups, in the order a job passes through them — prepress, press, bindery, mail.
Electronic prepress
Sheet-fed offset
Digital
Bindery
Mailing
That is the floor, in the order a job crosses it. Tell us what the piece is and we’ll tell you which of these it runs on.
Request a quote Call (763) 475-1826Got a job for one
of these presses?
Send the specs and we’ll tell you what it runs on and what it costs. Or call (763) 475-1826 and talk it through.