Well-rounded printer

BOULDER — Newspapers, being in essence a very flat medium, really don’t do it justice.

Because if there were only some depth to this medium, something cute could be said, such as,

“Picture your photograph here.”

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Printing on curved, three-dimensional surfaces is the heart and soul of a pretty novel business idea, which belongs to Columbus Imaging of Gunbarrel. More so, Columbus picked out the curvy-type items that many of us have long yearned to see our faces grace: baseballs, mini-basketballs, mini-volleyballs and mini-footballs.

“Our first-generation machine is set up for mini-sports products less than six inches,´ said Dave Kempf, the chief executive of Columbus. “Our next generation can accommodate the larger sports products (such as full-size footballs).”

Columbus has a proprietary high-speed digital printing process, which apparently is notably superior to pad printing or heat-transfer (silk screening) processes that have dominated this market.

“Our biggest competition is Fotoball (which mainly handles logo products),” Kempf said. “The smallest quantity they will take is 500 units.” In addition, there are set-up charges and a lead time of six to eight weeks, because Fotoball, like many of the other sports memorabilia printers, produces in China.

The truly amazing bit about the Columbus’ printer and business model is it will print one item at a time without set-up charges. Retail prices range between $8.95 and $14.95 depending upon the sports object, which also include hockey pucks and mini-soccer balls.

The best way to get a handle on the product is to actually go to Columbus’ Web site, www.columbusimage.com, with a digital image of someone you love playing ball — perhaps yourself. Columbus can print at near-300-dpi quality, so the image should be close to that resolution (at least 200 kilobytes).

The Web site will not only show what the photo will look like on the sports object of your choice, the Web software also will handle image cropping. The backside also can be printed think about your kid’s season statistics — for an additional $2.50.

And you might want to have a credit card on hand as well, because Columbus will deliver any products received by Dec. 19 before Christmas.

Senior Vice President of Marketing and Sales Larry Katzer, who was living in the San Francisco area, founded the company in July 2001. The company is working on its patents so company officials can’t speak much about the process. However, they will say the process does take a JPEG image, with which most everyone doing any kind of digital images is familiar, and ink that is cured by an ultraviolet lamp.

The printer is capable of producing two items every minute. Obviously, there is no change in from each job order — the only change is switching from footballs to baseballs, for instance.

The first printing machine had to be built by contract. Switching the technology from paper to product wasn’t easy. The company is seeking additional funding at this time, although it is already generating sales.

Dayn Floyd, the director of premium seating services for Major League Baseball’s Oakland Athletics, could not have been more complimentary about the Columbus product. Most of the suites at the Oakland stadium are leased on a game-by-game basis, and Floyd said having Columbus products has been an asset to compete with the many other bay area sports teams. Already, 17 suite renters have already opted to have baseballs specially printed for the event.

“The first guy to do it had a pyramid of 100 balls, with the date, his company’s logo and the A’s logo. It made the day a little more special to them.”

More so, it may be an ultimate bit of specialty advertising for people bringing clients to the suites, Floyd said. “These are the kind of things that can sit on someone’s desk for a long time,” he said.

“It’s no hard cost to the A’s, but at the same time helps generate business,” Floyd said. “For our customers, it comes at a very inexpensive rate.

“I was one of the first to try this out in baseball. They’ve been wonderful.”

So wonderful, that Floyd tried to get Columbus to set up a kiosk at the stadium so people could have their photo taken and put on a baseball within 30 seconds. Kempf said the printer was designed to do exactly this, but with much of the patent work still to be completed, “the last thing we wanted was a bunch of Stanford engineers giving it a look.”

And with 68 million children involved in organized sports today, there would seem to be little reason to rush into the kiosk market. The Columbus Web site has only been up for a month, and without any advertising yet, but is already taking fairly regular orders, Kempf said.

“We have opened up entirely new markets that could not be previously served because of minimum orders and cost,” Kempf said.