Advice for getting first digital printer

[pabzoid]

Hi there!

I've been lurking for a while and joined up to ask for some help and advice. I work for a wedding stationery company and we currently outsource our printing, however we're looking to bring that in-house and get our first printer.

The supplier we use uses HP Indigo printers, which I imagine is massively overkill for our volume, but the quality is amazing.

Would anyone be able to recommend a suitable replacement machine? We print around 70-100 A3 sheets per day, print on textured card which is 280gsm and also print on both sides of the sheets sometimes.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. At the moment we spend around £2,000 ($3000) on printing per month, so budget wise if we get a lease and the total monthly costs were lower than this then it would make sense.

Are there any brands that we should outright avoid?

Thanks!

 

[ajr]

For your volume and quality stick with your current printer. You would need all the finishing equipment aswell (you may already have though).

AjR

 

[lfelton]

There are no cheap machines that will give you the same level of quality. If we look at the Xerox range for instance, the entry level J75 is a fine machine, but we've rejected that as not being capable of producing commercially acceptable photographic work (we mainly print books and magazines), so that leaves the Versant 2100 as the next step up. We bought our first one of those last month after a fair bit of evaluation and the output is good enough for our kind of work. Remember, we (and you presumably) don't just need high print quality, we need colour accuracy and consistency from job to job, week to week. I would guess that a 4 year lease on a Versant with a stacker would be somewhere around £2000 a month. Of course, that's just the tip of the iceberg in the running costs. It's pretty much the same with the Konica-Minolta range IMO, you need to be looking at a machine like the c1080 to run consistent quality on volumes of photo work. They are a little more expensive capital, a little cheaper to run.

On the other hand, if that level of quality is not really necessary for your business, why not have a chat with all the "usual suspects" about their entry level machines? Xerox, Konica-Minolta, Ricoh and Canon.

My advice is to take a hard look at what you need to achieve. If it's reducing costs, then this is probably a bad idea. You need to be on a much higher volume before that makes any kind of commercial sense. If there are other commercial considerations, for instance you need a faster turnaround to meet customer requirements, then the above comments apply.

 

[JustinB]

I would look seriously at the Canon imagePRESS C60

It's a low volume, high quality machine that will handle up to 300gsm paper (12-14pt cardstock)

The price should be right for what you want too.

The Canon imagePRESS C700 is a little bigger machine but it might be overkill for what you want.

 

[pabzoid]

Thanks for your help guys! I'm going to speak to the usual suspects and see what lease costs will come down to. I'll take a look at the Canon imagePress c60 too, thanks Justin!

 

[Possumgal]

It does seem that your print volumes are pretty low to get your own machine. Remember that the more volume, the lower the per-click charge usually, so don't expect a good deal when you get quotes.

 

[jjumboxerox]

Go For Canon C800
Best For Starting
I Am Using From Last 2 Months and the Machine is Great

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j51vtZ5Es5I