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Hi, I’m Dan Kimmerly. I’m the Graphics Director at KDM P.O.P. Solutions Group based
out of Cincinnati, Ohio. We’ve had our first FB7500 installed, it was the show one at SGIA,
it was in 2009. Some of the things we liked about it was the speed, obviously was great,
a lot more automated than anything else that we were looking at at that time. The upgrade
path was something that was of huge importance to us at the time. That was honestly one of
our first questions when we met with the vice president of HP to discuss this. He insisted,
he promised us that there would be an upgrade path and you know obviously his word was rung
true because there was one. So that was the big reason we went with the 7500 originally
because honestly we were tired of buying a press, a year later, guess what? We have to
replace it because there’s something new. As far as the beta program for the FB7600,
yeah, we had a few reservations. We inquired about, “Hey can you check on this?” “We’d
like to test this.” We had them test a few things before we got into it because we don’t
want to all of a sudden our machine be down for weeks and weeks because this ink isn’t
working out or this new part or mode isn’t working out or some software glitch, but it
all went very smooth. We’re extremely happy with how smooth it all went. The ink that
comes with the 7600 is the 225 series ink. We've been very happy with that. Greater adhesion
and it’s enabled us to print on a few substrates that maybe we couldn’t print on before,
polycarbonate is one of them, and then there are some others. Or maybe we had chipping
or something like that going on with the styrenes that problem’s gone and it’s just kind
of gave us greater adhesion overall, and actually now when I’m testing a new product, I’ve
just been just putting it on the 7600 because I know it has the best ink adhesion, period.
The FB7500 or 7600 platform, whichever you go with, has been impactful to our business
because we’ve been able to move a lot more product from screen to digital or from, in
some cases, offset to digital. Not as quick to move that because often those are just
huge, ridiculously huge quantities, but we’ve been able to move a lot of the screen print
stuff to digital and we can do so with fewer overs. We can do so with the first print is
going to match the last print. If it’s a 500 piece job or a 700 piece job we print,
that’s what we need, maybe we print a few extras in case there’s a problem in cutting
or finishing or something like that, but we don’t have to run five or 10 percent overs
or something crazy like that. Especially when you get into the plastics that we do, that
is a huge expense. One thing that's been great for our customers is turn time. Where previously
with analog, whatever form of analog that was, we have to do the screens, we have to
do the films, all this stuff. Our turn times are like that, so, where maybe we get this
job for 500 sheets, screen print it would have been days, a week. You know, now we can
knock it out in a very short amount of time. I mean if we really wanted to, we could knock
it out in a day or two. It’s that insane how fast and how quick things are moving.
The customers continue to demand quicker turns, quicker turns. There’s a lot more customization
where perhaps in the past we would have done a lot more of the, maybe a customer orders
a thousand banners, OK no problem. We did the thousand banners. Now they want 180 of
this one that’s just for this region or 100 of them for this region, five for this
region, 10 for this region. They're still ordering a thousand banners, it’s just now
with the customization and basically print on demand, that’s changed a lot. That’s
really been a game changer and you have to be able to change with those changes, and,
you know, presses like the 7500 or 7600 really helps us to be able to do that.