Quote:
Originally Posted by designleicester
I work for a design and marketing agency and increasingly we're seeing clients shifting from litho print to more short run work. Predominantly the jobs are no bigger than A3/B3 so we thought we might look at options for buying our own press in the future. We realise that this is a large undertaking and not something we can simply walk into, however its time to start learning! One of our suppliers uses an HP Indigo (?) which produces really good results and I'm keen to find out a) how much they cost and b) if there are any other machines that might be worth a look? Thanks in advance!
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You need to speak to HP, most of the pricing information is under NDA. In very rough terms and factoring in the majority of the costs, if you print 100,000 CMYK SRA3 sheets (one side) per month that will cost your company about 17p a sheet excluding the cost of the paper. Obviously CMYK+LCLM or CMYK+OV that will cost more. If you print 200,000 per month that reduces it very roughly down to 11p a sheet. If you fall below 100,000 then obviously your cost per sheet is drastically increased. You will know what you can sell a sheet for in the UK, but most people estimate from around 18p, rising to as much as 50p+ for novelty items such as personalised calendars. Variable data applications are totally different, with a different pricing structure (although the print is charged out at exactly the same rates of course). You need to push big numbers through an Indigo to make money out of them.
Don't forget that you will also need to make a very significant investment in finishing equipment (and people to run them).
There is nothing else on the market with as good print quality as an Indigo, so if you bring this in-house, you need to know what is "good enough" for your clients. The other "usual suspects" are: Xerox, Canon, and Konica-Minolta. If you search this forum, you'll find a lot of useful information about the different models and their relative capabilities. You'll also find a wealth of BS, so will have to figure out which is which.
Hope that helps, but your first step is to speak with HP.
