On February 27, with rocket ship imagery and the acrobatics of a pair of glittering aerialists as the backdrop, the Diversified Global Graphics Group (DG3, Jersey City, NJ) launched an HP T230 color inkjet web press into an orbit it hopes to fill with richly colored variable print.

There to celebrate the liftoff were about 100 customers who now can add high-volume digital web printing to the array of services they buy from DG3, one of the top providers print and visual communication products in the Northeast.

The press, installed last November and put through its first full-scale production run a few weeks ago, is DG3’s latest investment in technologies aimed at broadening the range of the digital and conventional marketing resources it offers to a high-end business clientele.

“For me, it’s about custom communication,” said Thomas Saggiomo, president and CEO of the $150 million company. With the HP T230 in place, he said, “the challenge is to get clients to think creatively” about how it can help them personalize the ways they communicate with their customers via direct mail, marketing collateral, documents, and other kinds of work the press will be used to manufacture.

Thomas Saggiomo, president and CEO, Diversified Global Graphics Group (DG3)

The HP T230 is the new centerpiece of a digital pressroom that also features a pair of cut-sheet HP Indigo six-color devices. Connected to the web press are finishing units for inline perforating, scoring, and cutting—key assets for achieving the kind of high-speed, high-volume integrated workflow that is essential for ROI with a press of this capacity. Close by are additional resources for post processing, including saddlestitching and perfect binding.

The HP T230 is the enhanced-output version of the HP T200, one of three T-series color inkjet web platforms available from HP. Designed to run a 22″ web (20.5″ image area) at speeds up to 400 feet per minute in duplexed mono or full color, the press can print with full variability on standard uncoated offset web stocks and compatible coated media. The ink set is CMYK, augmented by a liquid bonding agent that improves ink appearance and durability when uncoated stocks are used.

All of these performance features came into play in the production of the HP T230’s first job for DG3, a 650,000-piece run for a healthcare provider in which every copy contained unique data. Guests at the launch party got a smaller-scale but no less personalized demonstration of what the press can do in printed keepsakes that displayed their faces, photographed when they arrived, in three different formats on the cut and perfed sheet.

Joseph Lindfeldt, DG3’s executive vice president for corporate development, said that the HP T230 would go a long way toward helping customers achieve “collateral virtualization”: DG3’s term for print-on-demand workflows that eliminate the need to over-run and stockpile printed matter. The ability of the press to print variably in whatever quantity and on whatever schedule the customer wishes will “make fulfillment extinct as it relates to print collateral,” Lindfeldt said.

The high-volume capacity of the web press—HP puts its duty cycle at 50 million letter-sized impressions per month—also enables it to achieve production economies in personalized long runs that cut-sheet digital presses can’t match, according to Lindfeldt.

“This widens the gamut of print on demand,” he said.

Although DG3’s enthusiasm for its HP T230 is intense, the passion wasn’t kindled overnight. Lindfeldt said that before the purchase finally was announced at Print 13, he and other DG3 personnel had spent “a year and a half in a room with HP” making certain that the press would be the right platform for the customized solutions that DG3 offers to healthcare and insurance companies,  pharmaceutical manufacturers, advertising agencies, and other corporate customers.

Now the priority for DG3 is to fill “the big gap” that exists in the way some of these customers think about personalized digital printing and the data management issues that go along with it, Lindfeldt said.

Also on hand for the launch was Aurelio Maruggi, HP’s vice president and general manager, who noted that other T-series customers have been successful with the same applications that DG3 plans to run on its HP T230. He said that one of every three color digital web presses currently sold by HP goes to a printer who already has one or more of the machines. Repeat customers know that the flexibility high-speed inkjet web printing gives them will be essential to keeping up with changing print market demands, according to Maruggi.

As DG3’s director of digital operations, Larry Durso shepherded the HP T230 from initial setup to readiness for full production. He praised the press for its ability to handle a wide range of stock weights with full ink coverage at or near full rated speed. The press is crewed by two operators who also tend the inline finishing equipment while runs are in progress, Durso said.

The HP T230 takes its place in a general production environment where high-speed, high volume-printing is routine. In addition to its digital printers, DG3 has one of the largest concentrations of offset litho equipment in the tristate metro area, including two eight-color and two six-color sheetfed presses and six webs. The company also has extensive capabilities for binding, finishing, mailing, and fulfillment.

Transitioning from offset to digital printing was not a factor in the decision to install the HP T230, Saggiomo said.