East is East, and West is West. This is true for many printers - printers engaged in screen printing never seem to be involved in the digital printing process, and digital printers tend to produce wide format prints, expressing long screen print jobs. Contradictory emotions. However, in Omaha you can find the phenomenon of friendly coexistence.
Omaha's Curzon Advertising Picture Company, which is a partnership between Kirby Smith and EJ Stanek, recently decided to open a new path based on the 53-year screen printing business. For this reason, they considered adding a wide format. Digital printers complement the already successful screen printing. They chose the NUR Salsa 1500, a 60-inch inkjet digital printer.
Stanek said: “We used to be engaged in screen printing in the past and it was the main driving force for the development of our company. However, digital printing machines can help us to mine more orders from existing customers, deal with those fewer and require no Too high print jobs.†In the past, this part of the work was always abandoned or outsourced.
As a supplier of promotional products for the retail market, Curzon supplies refrigerator labels, shelf labels and utensil labels to retail stores nationwide. Stanek and Smith are very pleased to announce that they can also provide customers with short-term products that they need at any time. Stanek said that they are no longer limited to the retail market and can easily handle it even if they encounter other types of print jobs.
When deciding whether to use a digital printing method or a screen printing method, it depends mainly on the print itself. Smith said: "Digital printing is designed for short-lived, low-speed print jobs, and the efficiency and profitability of screen printing will be higher. There is no absolute judgment on the criteria for using that process. With the rapid development of technology, the most economical number of prints using digital printing is 20 to 30, but by next year this number will rise to 50, compared with 1 to 2 last year."
The most favorable situation for Curzon is to report the price of the two methods to the customer at the same time so that the customer can choose the printing method with the most profit. Smith said they have dedicated formulas and evaluation software that can be used to determine which system should be used better. Calculating the price of a digital job is easier because it only affects the number of square feet. The screen printing process involves more parameters. How many colors will be used? What is the substrate? How is the printing cycle? What printer is used? and many more.
Stanek added: In the screen printing process, if the print contains one, two or three or four colors, it is likely to affect the printing cycle. In digital printing, no matter how many colors are printed, it will not affect the printing cycle.
One of Curzon's important customers is the Coastal Mart chain, whose business is usually screen-printed logos, flags or in-store advertising items. According to Smith, they are now also providing digital prints to the customer.
Smith says comparing the price of screen printing with digital printing is like comparing apples to oranges and each has his own strengths. But for Coastal Mart chains, the more types of prints, the better.
For one or two store promotions, Smith pointed out that they will complete these operations on a digital press. In addition to the NUR inkjet printers, Curzon also purchased five semi-automatic monochrome presses, including one SIAS, two Dorn Stallions, a Cincinnati banner press, and a Viking press. The company can produce 5 to 12 inch screen prints.
Screen printing and promotional products are still their main operating items, but both Smith and Stanek believe that digital printing machines have created a new world for the development of their company's market.