Published March 2005

Pacific Copy bringing
high-tech press to town

By Kimberly Hilden
SCBJ Assistant Editor

Pacific Copy & Printing Co. plans to crack open a new market while better serving its existing one through top-of-the-line technology found in its latest press, a machine that prints 15,000 sheets an hour, offers an array of color options and dries sheets instantly.

“The name of the game today is turnaround time. We’ve gone out and spent about $600,000 to bring this new technology into Everett,” said Jerry Wilson, president of Everett-based Pacific Copy & Printing.

The new press, a RYOBI 524GXP, is one of the newest models manufactured by Japan-based Ryobi Ltd. and has the capability of printing four colors on one side of paper or a combination of two colors per side, Wilson said.

Along with the latest in digital automation, from plate loading to color correction, the press uses an aqueous coder, a device that envelops the newly printed sheet with a protective sealant.

“The sealant protects the image, but most importantly, it ensures that the sheet is 100 percent dry upon printing. It takes all that drying time out of the scenario,” Wilson said.

For customers, that means less wait time for their printing project to be completed, he said, noting that with an older press it could take as many as four hours to ensure that one side of a sheet was dried before continuing to print the other side. As for projects that required page cutting, the wait from press to cutter could be as long as overnight.

Pacific Copy & Printing already offers high-end digital printing, both in color and black and white, for the general office and small commercial market, Wilson said. The new press will enable the company to undertake longer run lengths — with faster turnaround time and higher print quality — for large commercial print jobs as well.

“With the new press, the company will be able to offer 8-1/2-by-11-inch full-color copies for as little as 10 cents a copy if the run lengths are long enough,” he said.

Ordered in December, the press is expected to arrive and be operational by late May, said Wilson, adding that the company has spent $50,000 to remodel its 4,500-square-foot facility to make room for the 23-foot-long machine.

Along with relocating machinery and supplies, a 4-by-23-foot hole has to be dug out of the concrete floor and filled with rebar to support the 28,000-pound press. The building also will upgrade its electrical system to increase capacity from 400 to 800 amps.

The addition of the RYOBI 524GXP is among a number of improvements the 27-year-old print shop has made in the past few years, including updating its regular printing presses and moving to direct-to-plate technology in its pre-press department, Wilson said.

That technology, which enables a digital image to be imprinted directly onto a metal printing plate — without shooting the image to film and then pressing it into a plate — saves a step in the production process while producing a higher-quality image, he said.

Once it began printing direct to plate, Pacific Copy & Printing realized it was ready to take the next step to grow its business, said Wilson, a 43-year veteran of the printing industry. The question was whether there was a market to support the hundreds of thousands of dollars in investment needed to take that step.

“We spent a year researching our customer base and the community to see if there was a need,” he said, noting that the research did, indeed, find a demand for all the benefits a new press of that kind could bring.

“We’ve never made an investment of this magnitude,” said Wilson, who plans to add to two more employees to his 15-member staff. “... We’re basically doubling the size of the business at this point.”

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