Company
Kwik Kopy
Glendale, AZ

Profile
Kwik Kopy, Glendale, Arizona, is a pioneering organization in digital workflow and in computer-to-plate. Founded in 1987, Kwik Kopy is a family- owned business run by three partners: Donna Mincher, her brother Glen Konrad, and Konrad’s wife Nancy. The shop serves a mixture of personal, smalland large-business clientele, and prints everything from black-andwhite to four-color process.

In a fiercely competitive market, the partners pride themselves on personal service, their “can-do” attitudes, and state-of-the-art technology. Their commitment to technology includes computer-to-plate (CTP), electronic file transfer and integrated scanning.

Before CTP
Kwik Kopy has two presses: an Itek 3985 twin-tower, a Ryobi 3200 with a T-head, and an A.B. Dick 9810 duplicator press. Both presses are used for one- and two-color work. The twin-tower press is also used for process color work. Before CTP, Kwik Kopy purchased film from a service bureau, and burned metal plates on a contact frame. Customers’ camera-ready artwork was converted to film or silver-halide plates on an Itek 430 camera. A conventional workflow was costly and labor-intensive, however. It was difficult to control the quality of camera-ready artwork from customers, and platemaking from electronic files was cumbersome and labor-intensive. The partners saw the need for CTP.

Finding the Right CTP System
Glen Konrad researched platesetter alternatives. Because it was so important to choose the right system, Konrad did a thorough search, collected specifications and visited several printers with equipment. He also did what many experts suggest when buying a car — he checked with the mechanic. Kwik Kopy’s independent service technician highly recommended the Printware PlateStream. While the PlateStream was not the least expensive platesetter, they were impressed with what they got for the money.

Building a Digital Infrastructure
Donna Mincher reports that they are regularly updating computers, and the adoption of CTP was also accompanied by a computer upgrade. In addition to modernizing their Macintosh platforms and operating systems, the prepress department added more Windows PCs. Although Kwik Kopy’s major customers are Mac-based, many new customers are PC-based. True dual-platform prepress was eased with the introduction of the platesetter as the primary output device. After some network glitches were worked out, the PlateStream and its accompanying Harlequin raster image processor have been able to seamlessly accept files from either Macs or PCs.

Like most printers, a larger portion of Kwik Kopy’s jobs are being specified electronically, and CTP allows them to dramatically streamline the production of electronic jobs. Mincher and her team fight the usual problems of badly constructed files, missing fonts, and missing graphics in electronic jobs; but once customers learned how to produce files properly, the results were impressive. “We have one customer who has already provided dozens of electronic jobs. All but one went straight to the platesetter with almost no intervention. The one job that gave us troubles was a Word file. Jobs from publishing applications work very well,” says Mincher.

Issues and Future Plans
With their CTP workflow in place, Mincher is looking to the future. They are still working on optimizing four-color process jobs using CTP and polyester plates. Mincher wants to continue to encourage and facilitate more jobs in electronic format because with their CTP workflow, it saves both the printer and the customer time and money.

Summing up the benefits of CTP: “Better quality, lower costs and faster turnaround,” says Mincher. Mentally adding up the benefits, Mincher is certain the investment in CTP has more than paid off. Asked if she would do it again, she answers: “It’s meant changes, but overall, yes—it’s worked out very well.”

Major Benefits of Digital Workflow
Lower Costs -The most tangible benefit of Kwik Kopy’s new digital workflow has been the virtual elimination of service-bureau film used for burning plates. This has saved about $10 per plate (hundreds of dollars per month) in film. But Mincher also reports significant intangible savings. “PlateStream CTP workflow has reduced our labor and significantly reduced mistakes and redos. It has also eliminated the costs and headaches of storing imaged as well as raw metal plates.”

Better Image Quality - On virtually every job, quality is as good or better than metal plates made from negatives. There is not any of the degradation of quality inherent in analog processes. CTP also eliminates one of the biggest quality problems they have with customers’ camera artwork, which is poor quality screens from laser or even ink-jet printers. CTP workflow allows Kwik Kopy to set screens in the application, printing 150-line or higher screens, much finer than their old platemaking process or most customer-provided artwork could support.

Faster Job Turnaround - Job preparation and pre-press have been significantly streamlined. Jobs are ready to go immediately, with a minimum of prepress. Summarizes Mincher, “There used to be a lot of prepress work required. For example, a routine two-color, two-sided 11 x 17-inch job from camera-ready artwork required a good deal of labor in cutting, paste-up, retouching and platemaking. With CTP, the job is ready to go immediately.”