Local Color

More and more small businesses are buying digital copiers in lieu of relying on outside print shops to do their color work.

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Shop Talk: CEOs search for the right technology

Digital color copiers enable you to produce everything from coupons and posters to brochures in-house

For fans of the Utah Grizzlies, most of the action takes place on the ice. For the managers of the minor-league hockey team, however, it's the scores outside the rink that really get the blood pumping.

Those scores could make a quantum leap during the next 15 years because the Grizzlies' arena, the E Center, in West Valley City, Utah, has been selected as the site of the 2002 Winter Olympics men's ice-hockey event. How the $10-million company chooses to exploit that coup -- through sponsorships and especially through selling the naming rights for the arena -- could boost revenues by as much as 7%.

Faced with the arena's impending celebrity status, Grizzlies president Tim Mouser knew one thing for certain: the company's marketing materials -- including coupons that are distributed at games, statistics sheets for autograph signings, and presentations for sponsors -- needed to be produced both more efficiently and more economically. It was time to move from outsourcing color jobs to producing them in-house with a digital color copier.

Although color copiers that use top-quality laser imaging start at about $14,000 (compared with the less sophisticated ink-jet copiers that cost less than $1,000), more and more small businesses are buying the digital copiers in lieu of relying on outside print shops to do their color work. The machines can produce everything from small coupons and letter-size flyers to full-color double-sided brochures and full-bleed 11-by-17-inch posters. And when the copiers are loaded with any number of optional features, they can double as either a printer or a scanner.

For example, with the addition of a print controller -- which turns a color copier into a color printer -- the machine can produce everything from color proofs of an original design to endless copies of the final product. Once you've launched a program like Adobe Photoshop on your PC, the print controller also lets you use the copier as a scanner. Add a color editor into the mix, and you gain desktop control of tones while the image is sitting on the platen glass. For many businesses, those applications make a color copier worth its hefty price.

The six-year-old Grizzlies team got its first splash of in-house color with a Xerox DocuColor 5750, a $19,995 machine that an office-equipment dealer had dropped off in September 1999 for a two-month free test-drive. Up to that point, the company's three-person graphics department had been driving 90 miles round-trip to the print house it preferred just to get color proofs -- a hefty order even when a job didn't require same-day turnaround for last-minute tweaking. "There was never enough time," says Mouser, one of several Grizzlies executives who collectively take on at least 20 presentations a week.

The marketing materials for the naming-rights sale brought the time and cost discrepancies into clear focus. For each company that's bidding for the naming rights, the Grizzlies create a 50-page presentation that includes images of the bidding company's logo on such structures as the arena's walls, marquees, roof, floor, and dasher boards (the boards that the hockey players crash into), on street signs surrounding the arena, and in the ice. Each packet produced in-house, Mouser calculates, would cost the Grizzlies about $7; each one outsourced, he says, costs roughly $450. "The whole organization ultimately realized that a color copier is not necessarily a luxury -- it's a tool of profitability," he says.

Though Mouser was happy with the efficiency of the Xerox DocuColor 5750, he wanted to see how a couple of other models -- a Minolta CF910 and a Sharp AR-C150 -- measured up. After all, spending $30,000 to $40,000 on a single item for a 30-employee organization is not something a company president does lightly. Having already established contact with Xerox, Mouser undertook a decidedly unscientific search for dealers that handled Minolta and Sharp products. He found a Minolta dealer through a primitive medium by today's standards: the phone book. And a Sharp dealer essentially fell into the company's lap. "I drive by their place every day on the way to work," says Devin Allen, director of marketing and sales.

The features of the Minolta CF910 (list price, $20,495) impressed the team during a one-month in-house test-drive of the machine. With its ability to print on 12-by-18-inch paper to produce an 11-by-17-inch, full-bleed image with crop marks -- dimensions that the Grizzlies needed to customize posters for its game sponsors -- the Minolta clearly had the technology that the company required. But it fell a bit short in the resolution department: to achieve the quality Mouser was looking for, a copier needed to have a resolution of 600 dots per inch (dpi); the Minolta came in at just 400 dpi.

Moreover, though the Minolta did have a module -- called a Fiery Z4 print controller -- that allowed users to turn the copier into a network printer, it cost $19,950. The option was important, because with the increase in volume of graphics-heavy, customized presentations, the Grizzlies would need the machine as a printer as much as a copier. The team could use it to design a layout, refine the color choices, and print out a final version, all with the click of a mouse. Handling the work in-house would cost the Grizzlies 12¢ to 24¢ a page, compared with $14 to $20 a page for the color press check alone.

Next Mouser revisited the Xerox DocuColor 5750, which was still on loan. The Xerox was a strong contender from the beginning since the Grizzlies already had a taste of what the machine could do. That machine, too, could handle the full-bleed, 11-by-17 image that the Grizzlies needed for its sponsors' designs. But the Xerox missed the mark with its 400-dpi resolution; like the Minolta, that was about 200 dpi short of the Grizzlies' goal. And even with the Fiery X2 print controller (list price $10,495), the machine was a little below par for the color quality the Grizzlies wanted.

Mouser moved on to the Sharp AR-C150 (list price, $22,995), which he viewed at the dealer's site for several hours at a time over a two-week period. Like the others, the copier could produce 11-by-17, full-bleed printouts, also by printing on 12-by-18 paper. And it had a print controller, called a Fiery AR-PE1, whose price of $14,995 was well below that of the Minolta. But particularly pleasing to Mouser was the Sharp's 600-dpi resolution and its speed of 25 copies a minute for black-and-white, letter-size sheets and 15 copies a minute for color -- well ahead of the competition.

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