Advice for newbie in an emeging market

[kemiad]

Hi I am starting a printshop in Liberia West Africa. the most commonly used printer here is a KORD 64 but I plan to do digital but I can not afford to buy new equipment.
Mt research points to a Xerox Docucolor Solution and I have seen a number of used presses for sale in the USA and Europe.

My questions are:

How easy is support for these machines outside of the Xerox warranty and support contracts which are not available here

How easy are these machines to train users on, considering the fact that no-one here has used them before

What can I do to ensure that I do not buy duds as I will have to ship stuff out here and getting parts could be a challenge. Are there key parts and materials, I can stockpile.

If anyone has specific recommendations for other equipment please share


Thanks

 

[UberTech]

Kemiad,

Im not going to advise you what machine to buy as I think you will get a more educated answer from someone who owns the machine you mention. But I will give you some advice that seems to be overlooked by people who 'go digital'.

• Digital machines are good, but they are not perfect, no one has built the perfect digital machine yet.
• Digital machines use heat, pressure and high voltage to create a print. Do not expect the piece of paper to come out the other end looking like it did but with toner on it.
• Damp paper is not a myth.
• Your inkjet at home may do a better job but it is designed for a complete idiot and costs you about $2 a page.
• The chances of the colour on your screen matching your print are exactly zero. The screen is projecting RGB the paper is reflecting CMYK. Plugging your computer into the printer with no colour management and expecting a match is not likely.

Some people have the expectation that they will print to a digital press and get a fantastic result immediately. Digital printing is a fine art, there are a lot more variables involved than you would expect hidden and otherwise. So other than an adequate environment you need an exceptionally high level of skill to troubleshoot pdfs, embedded profiles, manky files your customer creates and the list goes on.

Usually your vendor will go to some effort to walk you thru these problems but at the end of the day it’s not as easy as buying a printer, plugging into a computer and printing money, not by a long shot.

 

[GusG]

I'm in Uganda (emerging market if ever there was one) and started two years ago with a Konica-Minolta Bizhub, only because they were represented here (we come from pre-press so PS and PDF issues are well known to us). We did all right and got a second one but as with all business in Uganda, everyone is on the sidelines waiting to see if something works out and if it does, they go into that business and start competing on price.
After at least 5 printers and designers around me got a K-M Bizhub I decided to up the ante and get a serious production machine that would leave them behind. I found a Xerox DC2060 at a good price and although it has had its teething problems, when it runs there is nothing like it in town both for quality and productivity though there is an Indigo 5500 but they are selling prints at 3-4 times the market rate and it always seems to be down. On Saturday I printed 2000 A4s duplexed and over 6000 SRA3s duplexed and the machine was breathing easy. I then discovered that there are a number of technicians who know Xerox and who can diagnose issues with their PWS laptops, though I do have to help them sometimes with feedback from this and other forums. There are plenty of spares available, even on Ebay. However, with these old machines I would say that you need redundancy otherwise you will let down your clients when your machine is down and that can be a week if you have to bring in a spare from out. Running the Fiery RIP is not such a big deal if you have some pre-press or colour background.
If I were starting from scratch now and with the knowledge I now have, I think I would opt for two or even three DC 12s with Fiery RIPs and a densitometer for calibration. That would perhaps not give me the fastest speed but I would get the quality and have redundancy and all at a very reasonable investment, you can pick up toners etc. on Ebay for almost nothing for these machines.
Just my opinion