If there is a single leading industry ex-pert in the field of color copying, it probably is Larry Hunt. His Color Copy News has been helping printers choose and use color copiers in their businesses for the past 17 years. If there was ever any doubt that today's crop of color digital output devices are light years ahead of where they used to be, Hunt has put that to rest with his latest color copier survey.

"Back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the color copiers ran at about five copies per minute," he noted in the June issue of Color Copy News. "The survey averages were about 5,000 copies per month. In the mid to late 1990s, the speeds moved up to 11 and 12 copies per minute and the average monthly volume moved up to 10,000 or so. On the latest results, most of the high speed models are running at 40 to 65 copies per minute and copy volume is running about 40,000 copies per month."

Not only are today's digital color copier/printers faster, they also offer many more features and increased durability. They are a perfect fit for today's PDF workflow and meld nicely with the capabilities of offset. QP contacted some major color copier/printer vendors to get their take on just where and how today's digital machines fit into a quick/small commercial print shop.

QP: What types of business opportunities does the new generation of digital color copiers bring to the quick and small commercial print market?

Fred Morrone, product manager, production and color systems marketing, Ricoh Americas: Business opportunities are limited only by the imagination of the business owner. Short-run color is traditionally off limits to offset press runs, so anything they have said no to in the past is now fair game. Things like menus of local restaurants, flyers and promotional materials, VDP mailer applications, short-run perfect bound books and coil bound books are now able to be run in-house quickly and at a substantial profit to the business owner.

Kevin Kern, vice president, product planning and development, Konica Minolta: The flexibility of these products creates a wide range of opportunities, whether it is offering new service levels and pricing options for short-run work to the oft discussed VDP opportunities. We see using the VDP capabilities of the product to support customer's integrated marketing campaigns, including personalized drive to Web promotions, as a growing market place, particularly where the printer provides additional value add services like kitting. We also see the strong in-line finishing features allowing printers to cost effectively produce short-run customized catalog work.

Jerry Murray, vice president, product marketing, Xerox Corp.: There are a number of new opportunities including photo (memory) books, direct mail, high end marketing pieces, including brochures. These printers/copiers have outstanding image quality that enables quick printers to transition work from offset devices onto digital devices, which enables more jobs. In-line finishing devices add capabilities for professional looking documents without the need for off-line, time consuming devices. Additionally, with Web-to-print software, printers can drive these new applications to digital devices directly from their customers while automating and reducing non-productive, time-consuming steps in the printing process.

Forrest Leighton, senior manager, product marketing, production systems division, Canon U.S.A.: A lot of the quick printers are used to digital technology from being familiar with digital copiers and now they're ready to move to the digital presses. VDP is one way to go, but the Web seems to be an area that they can latch onto very quickly. With Web-to-print solutions they are able to get their customers online and then they can grow business with that. We have an ASP (application service provider) model so that if they don't have the infrastructure and they want to build slowly, we can offer the crawl, walk, run approach. Some of the companies we partner with, like Printable Technologies, offer that type of solution, and that seems to work very well in the quick print space. They get the customers online with one or two products, then the customer starts to see how easy it is to order and then it becomes a different conversation about how to solve business problems instead of how much printing they want to buy. That can lead to the variable applications and once you get into the variable, it leads to direct mail. The two biggest areas of growth that we see are in the Web area and the direct mail area.