Printers find their way in digital world

With advertising increasingly turning to the internet in many formats, it is easy to imagine that commercial printing is going the way of the daily newspaper.

But in the northern Front Range, it’s still easy to find a mix of independent printers alongside some competitive chain or franchise printers, such as FedEx Office or Alpha Graphics. Some are extremely specialized outfits, while others have concentrated on consistently, and successfully, anticipating their customers’ changing needs.

Achieving the latter is often not an easy proposal, but for the owner of Ron’s Printing in Longmont, it’s been almost 40 years of staying just a bit in front of the technology curve.

“It will be 40 years next year,” said Ron Cheyney, who actually had experience with hot type printing in his high school days in Kansas City, Kan. Cheyney was running the Longmont Ledger in 1978 when the owner pulled the plug but offered to rent the “then-expensive” photo typesetting machine to him to start his own business.

Beginning by doing business with mostly ad agencies and printers who couldn’t afford the typesetting equipment, Cheyney gradually began adding offset presses and press operators. In the mid-80s, however, he bought his first desktop computer.

“We were probably the first company around here to install desktop publishing; the printer that we output on was a 300 dpi (dots per inch) laser printer,” he said.  “We originally hoped to do half our typesetting with the Mac, but within a month it had made our $30,000 typesetting machine obsolete.

“When I bought my first digital press, the machine cost more than all the equipment in my shop, and it wasn’t long until we got rid of all the offset presses but one (which is still useful for printing envelopes),” Cheyney continued.  “That’s about when big companies like Xerox and Canon started getting into the digital game — they saw the writing on the wall.”

Getting clients to go to the digital press — now a $200,000 Canon 10 VP at Ron’s — at first wasn’t easy, Cheyney said. However, it wasn’t long until they all saw the increase in quality, which for the shop came with a decrease in waste and substantial savings in material.

Morrell Graphics in Lafayette is another northern Colorado business with a significant history, having been around since 1975. Presumably, CEO Jim Morrell is still serving many of the same businesses his father, Gerry, began the business supporting.

Photo Craft Imaging of Boulder has also been around since 1974, having made it’s mark with quality printing, largely for an artistic community. Photo Craft is one of the few printmakers left that images with true silver-based photographic materials using the legendary LightJet by Cymbolic Sciences, according to its website.

In Fort Collins, Reprographics Inc. has also been around for more than 40 years, but more recently become somewhat specialized in big.

“There’s so many different printers, and you can call a half dozen and get a lot of different specialties,”  said General Manager Curtis Mettlen. “You have to be careful not to try to do everything. For us, we specialize in large-format printing.”

That makes a lot of sense, given that the company’s biggest clientele has traditionally come from the architecture, engineering and construction market. For instance, the company has always done blueprints, which 40 years ago was a large format.

“In that regard, we do try to be a one-stop shop for our clients,” Mettlen said. “But in the last 10 to 15 years we started to diversify into other markets. Typically, they share that same theme of needing large formats. A company that needs trade show graphics, banners, signs and art reproduction.”

But big has certainly gotten a lot, lot bigger.

Many large digital printers can do a variety of graphics that can be printed on vinyl and used for outdoor advertising. However, Reprographics has a big flatbed printer that can be used to print the substrate material in four-by-eight-foot sections.

“We don’t have to laminate the product, and that’s allowed us to be more efficient, saving the clients some money,” he said. Also the process can add to outdoor durability, making signage and other outdoor advertising a very easy step.

But printing in large formats has also led to another market for printers, Mettlen said, which is home and office decor. Essentially, custom and also replaceable wallpapers are making their mark.

“That’s  something that creeping into the market that you wouldn’t have expected 10 years ago,” he said. “And everything is always evolving. Lightweight, retractable banner signs are big at trade shows. The goal is always to get (signage) from point A to point B with as little brain damage as possible.”

Speaking of big and specialized, no company quite fits that description better than Circle Graphics of Longmont. The idea to print billboards digitally was first championed by company founder Hank Ridless in the late 1990s, and it proved immensely disruptive, cutting competitors’ prices by one half, said current CEO Andrew Cousin in company statements.

Cousins led an investment group to buy the company in 2012, and today it may print as much as 65 percent of all billboards in the nation. Circle Graphics manufactures all of its ink in-house, which provides further savings.

The company has expanded into the business and consumer markets, with regional offices in New York, San Francisco, Detroit and Austin, Tex.  Circle has 407,000 square feet of manufacturing facilities across the United States housing more than 88 grand (billboard size) and large format digital printers, custom automated finishing equipment and coating capabilities to produce printed recyclable materials up to 16-feet wide.

In Berthoud, the commercial printing plant established by Lehman Communications Corp. prior to its sale, is actually the shop for printing most of the northeastern Colorado newspapers owned by Prairie Mountain Media, including papers in Longmont, Loveland, Fort Morgan, Akron and Brush. Daily newspaper sales might have declined, but that’s not to say there aren’t publications that still need big web presses, said Production Director Randy Sannes.

“For us here in Berthoud, we do several foreign papers, including three Russian weekly newspapers,” Sannes said. “They are small press runs but they are big publications, between 72 to 150 pages.”

Along the way there are recreation guides and assorted other publications that still need big presses to run large press runs. Sannes said the Berthoud plant is the lone remaining web press facility left between Cheyenne and Denver on the Front Range and it remains a busy plant.

“Monday through Friday, we run 24/7 and during the weekend we run two 12-hour shifts,” he said.

So in a rapidly changing world there’s still room for independent printers, though it takes some moxie make it, Cheyney said.

“When they first brought a Kinkos (now FedEx Office) to town everybody thought it was going to hurt our business, but it really didn’t,” he said. “The same thing when internet printing came around.

“How do we compete? It’s strictly service; if you do something with Vista Print there’s no way you are going to get it today, and there’s no way you can see a sample before you buy.”

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