Screen Printing - December 2017/January 2018 - 30

SPECIAL ISSUE: INNOVATION

Er. Why don't you just print one color
off the screen and line everything up to
that print?
Oh, no. That takes too much time.
Plus, the line structure is so pixelated.
OK, here's the deal: Print the same
image on the ScreenJet, and print it on
your film; make the screens; print shirts

with them; and try to tell the difference
between the two.
Well, for that price, I could buy an
automatic press. A press makes me
money.
Well, wait a minute. You have to
make screens to put on that press.
Yes, but that only takes a few minutes.

ADVERTISEMENT

BEYOND DTG PRINTING

AnaJet Investing in Customer Success
THE FAST-MOVING direct-to-garment
industry saw a major change to its
landscape when Ricoh released its
RICOH Ri 3000 and Ri 6000 printers
in May 2017.
Regarding the Ricoh printers,
AnaJet's Marketing Director Paul
Crocker says, "Working with Ricoh,
we knew that the productivity,
reliability, and stability of these
new printers would take DTG
printing to the next level, and all
the feedback from the field since
their release has only cemented that
fact. Our customers have reported
increased output and reduced
downtime while consumer demand for
their custom DTG-printed garments
continues to grow exponentially."
Not resting on their laurels, AnaJet
has been devoting resources to
investing in their customers' success.
"Our aim is to go beyond offering the
best product and provide the best
business solution. Our customers'
success is our top priority," says Crocker.
AnaJet has begun connecting select
printer owners with already established
print orders to drive their business
even further. Says Crocker, "Already
in 2017, a handful of our printer
owners have purchased additional
printers to keep up with their customer
demand. We saw tremendous value
there and devoted resources to create

30

SCREENPRINTING

a program that would leverage
customer demand to help drive
business for Ricoh printer owners."

Crocker concludes, "We are offering
best-in-class printers with the RICOH Ri
3000 and Ri 6000. Both include Spark
software to customize designs and
create customer invoices, AnaRIP
software with ink-cost analysis and
TrueView automatic color adjustment,
and optional nationwide Ricoh
installation and service contracts. Our
new RICOH Garment Ink has the lowest
cost per liter out of all OEMs. All of
these have been designed with
customer success in mind and now we
are investing in our printer owners'
businesses. We are confident that these
value propositions, in addition to
exciting new products that we will be
announcing in early 2018, will make us
the most comprehensive solution
provider in the DTG industry."
Learn more at www.anajet.com or
call 877-626-2538.

McCue laughs again and cites these
conversations as the reason he has no
hair today. "No one ever realized how
long it took them to make screens," he
says. "Follow a film positive through
your shop: The film came out on a
roll, and you'd run over and cut it up.
And then you never trusted the image
header, so you had to find a light
table and check that they all registered. Then you'd have to get a really
big, custom envelope; write the job
number on there; and take them to the
screenroom. Then the screen operator
takes them out - and he doesn't trust
the films, either, so he gets his light
table..." You get the picture. McCue
would spell it out, time and time again,
on sales calls and in seminars; he even
built an ROI calculator that would
show, more often than not, that printers
could recoup their costs in a year or
less. A few in the audience would nod
their heads. The rest "looked at me like
I was crazy."
There were early adopters: Stahls'
Transfer Express, Adidas, others.
"There were pockets of people," says
McCue, "that went that way and never
looked back. But it didn't sell as quickly
as I thought it would."
Eventually, Gerber sold the patent to
Lüscher Technologies, a Swiss company
that was making large-format computerto-screen systems, and stopped making
the ScreenJet altogether.

THE NEXT GENERATION

Cheer up; there's more to the story. The
ScreenJet itself may have fizzled, but if
you look at CTS systems today, they're
not fundamentally very different than
they were in 1993. Inkjet models still jet
droplets of ink (or wax, an innovation
that came later) onto an emulsioncoated screen. Laser-based systems,
which developed in parallel with inkjet
models, still expose screens directly,
eliminating the intermediate positive
image altogether. The idea itself was
always a bright one; it just needed,
perhaps more than anything, some time.
It's no secret that the technology has
exploded in the past five years or so.
http://www.anajet.com
Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Screen Printing - December 2017/January 2018
