Major advances in UV digital flatbed inkjet printing technology has opened up new opportunities in the wide-format printing market to more diverse print providers such as commercial offset shops and quick printers. One large commercial shop that recently added digital wide-format printing to their service mix is Buhl Press, located in Berkeley, IL—a western suburb of Chicago.

The offset lithography firm took delivery of the Océ Arizona 250 GT about three months ago. "This equipment addition has expanded our service options for some of our clients. Our administrative and manufacturing activities of the company are housed in a modern 100,000 square foot facility. By co-locating pre-press, press, finishing, and wide-format services, we are able to provide a one stop solution and manufacture a wide array of products completely in-house by a highly qualified multi-shift workforce," said Charlie Barkley, president.

"Being offset lithographers, our quality expectations were very high because of the work with do on our big presses. We had been looking at the wide-format market for a number of years and were waiting for a couple of factors to converge. The first was the introduction of equipment that offered higher quality and the second was models with UV capability. In addition to that, we were looking for something that was reasonably priced to our standards."

Barkley admitted that the image quality on Océ Arizona 250 GT was by far the best of all the flatbed units they looked at. "We saw the model at the 2007 ISA show. The printer’s ability to reproduce type and photographic images with detail for a UV-curable printer was quite good," he reported.

"I also liked the variable drop size on the Arizona 250 GT, it gives us a very high resolution in the jobs we output. That gives us a big quality advantage in the jobs we can bid on. UV is a nice feature as well. It makes a lot of sense for us in helping run a more ‘greener’ shop. I probably wouldn’t have purchased it if it wasn’t a UV machine. All of those factors combined helped sell us on the printer," he said.

Barkley said they use the Arizona 250 GT for their POP work. "We print on all types of plastic substrates. Whatever substrates we can print on our presses we can print on the Arizona 250 GT."

Barkley reports that his company runs a very lucrative offset printing business, and, this year they wanted to test the waters in the wide-format arena. "We really aren’t in the sign business, we are offset lithographers. Still, we wanted to invest in a piece of wide-format printer equipment that would be a good entry point for us and help supplement our core offset work. Currently the digital part of our business is less than five percent of our revenues, but it’s growing."