Located in Orono, Maine, Printing & Mailing Services is the University of Maine’s official campus print shop.
Students, alumni, organizations, and departments at the university rely on the shop’s services for quality printing, competitive pricing, and convenience. As an award-winning G7 Master-certified print shop, the Printing & Mailing Services staff is incredibly proud of the high-quality results they strive to deliver for every project.
Within days of his arrival at UMaine, Print Services Technician David Fitzpatrick began troubleshooting a problem that had been tormenting the print team for over a year. The foiling machine used to customize the covers of theses, dissertations, real-estate tax books, and other bound materials was producing inferior-quality output.
The foil printed onto the surfaces was blotchy and lacked foil coverage which led to color bleed-through and had scratch marks due to uncontrollable foil wrinkling. David contacted the manufacturer’s technical support to examine where things were going wrong – machine settings, instructions, substrates. The manufacturer provided a new machine, and the problems continued.
David believed there had to be a better solution and found ImPress Systems after doing a web search. He liked that the company manufactures its digital foil printers in the USA, and he sent them an email.
“We sent some sample covers to ImPress for testing. The quality was leaps and bounds above the other printer,” David said. “We had a problem, and they solved it. You just can’t beat the quality.”
The image to the left is a single-pass side-by-side simultaneous scan of books printed with the old problematic printer and the replacement ImPress Systems digital foil printer. The cover on the left was printed using the problem printer. The red cover bleeds through the foil and while not a close-up image, you can still see the evidence of scratch marks. The cover on the right was printed using the ImPress Systems digital foil printer. Notice the brilliant gold color and luster of the foil. There is ample coverage with no bleed-through.
Learn more about ImPress Systems printers here or contact us with any questions at info@impresssystems.com.