Founded in 1979, Durant, OK-based Texoma became part of the family of companies owned by the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma.
In an interview with PrintWeek, Texoma Director Russell Marcum explained that one of the benefits of that relationship is the steady, but sometimes demanding stream of work, it receives from the Indian casinos in the area.
"If you’ve ever done work for casinos, its great work, but you get files on Wednesday and they need product by Friday," Marcum explained. "They all now have four and five star hotels so they require variety of pieces from direct mail pieces to rack cards, postcards and posters."
Marcum said the company did look at other equipment before deciding on the Presstek 75DI, including some used presses.
But he added: "We were really hoping we could get away from the traditional image setter, hanging plates, that sort of thing. What we found with other presses is that you would need to have two people running the equipment, with one person over doing the image setting.
"We thought we could get away with one person with the 75 DI and we’ve been running about three weeks and so far that’s been the case."
Texoma had older QuickMaster DI presses, so the company was already familiar with the DI. "We love the DI technology because you don’t need someone to run extra pieces of equipment and you can go from digital file to printed piece in six minutes," Marcum said.
"We were familiar with the smaller DI's and we sent one of our guys up to Presstek and they ran 11 of our forms of 1,000 press sheets each in just over three hours, including imaging all plates on press."
The Presstek 75DI features support for 300lpi and FM screening, a small environmental footprint and can print up to 16,000 six-up sheets or 96,000 letter-sized pages per hour.
Marcum said the new press is already enabling Texoma to keep work it previously had to outsource. As for his overall business, Marcum said the company’s ties to the casino industry have shielded it from some of the struggles other US printers have faced in recent years.
"We’re not really representative of the industry as a whole because the Indian casinos means some of our work is pretty much recession proof," he explained. "But we do other work as well and now there does seem to be a lot of activity. For the first time in three or four years the commercial work outside the casinos seems to be picking up."
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