Print United

A couple of weeks ago a couple of us were able to attend the yearly trade show for digital print production called “Print United”.  It is a chance for those of us in the industry to see what is currently on the market, and also what is on the near horizon.  It’s a place where many creative minds in the industry come and showcase their companies and their products. 

For us, it has been a great opportunity to forecast and plan for the future, giving us lead time to make decisions for our setup and efficiencies here at My Father’s World.  But I think the biggest thing it gives us is the opportunity to meet with so many different people from each of the companies that we have machines from. 

One of the machines we have on our floor is the Kyocera 15000c.  This is a production level, high speed, ink machine, that has been amazing for us to have.  It has dramatically changed the way we process color files and has allowed us to bring files to color that we had previously only done in mono.  With all that being said we found an issue when running a certain file on the 15000 that changed from 2 different kinds of media often throughout the process of running this file.  This changing process seemed to slow the production process down to a crawl.  After trying different things and speaking to different people, we wanted to bring it up while we were in the booth for Kyocera at Print United. 

As I said previously, when you are at the shows some of the brightest minds in the industry and for each company are present, so, you not only get to talk to them individually but, as was the case for us, you get to talk to them in a group setting with many of them present at once.  Our hope was that speaking to them in a group setting would give us things to try to alleviate our issue. This is exactly what happened for us.  After being introduced to a couple of engineers and installation techs, we started a conversation about our problem.  This then proceeded into a lot of back and forth between all of the representatives from Kyocera that were present.  Not in an argumentative manner, but in a “bounce ideas off of each other” type way.  After spending quite a bit of time, we had some info to try when we returned home and some follow up information that would be coming to us as well. 

When we returned to My Father’s World with our new information, our lead printer tried the different settings.  He followed some set up instructions that were given to us in emails we received after leaving the show, and, after setting up the file with new settings, he was able to drop the production time for one set of this file from 8 minutes to less than 2.  This means we can now produce an entire work order of this product in less than 4 hours compared to previously when it would take almost 2 days. 

So, as it has been many times in the past, Print United was well worth the trip. It gave us glimpses into what may be next for us, but it was also a game changer for something in our production schedule, creating approximately one and a half days of capacity for us. That alone was well worth the trip for us. I wonder what things and information the 2026 show will have in store for us.