Best Printing/Proofing Equipment For Office Environment?

[Flaneur]

A very general, open question. Will be eventually printing a magazine at 10 micron stochastic and currently looking into office equipment for 'general' proofing before sending off to pre-press. Looking to find out what kind of office printer may be most suitable for this. I realize calibration of any printer would really come down to communication with the ultimate print provider, but I'm just pretty overwhelmed by the options out there. Any suggestions would be great. Also looking for recommendations concerning any other equipment I may need for these same initial (office) proofing purposes. As in a viewing booth by GretagMacbeth, monitor calibrators, high-end scanners, or anything else which would be essential for the layout department of a magazine. I know this is a very broad question with a lot of variables involved...but I just need to have a round start somewhere, and whittle my way down to the rub. Any comments, suggestions would be of great help.

 

[DFagan]

Equipment

Equipment

Hi Flaneur,

We currently use a Xerox Phaser 7300 DN for our "mock up" type proofs and general printing needs. It can do 11 x 17, 8.5 x 11, 11 x 14 and other standard sizes and print on both sides (duplex). For our color matching proofs, we use an Epson 9880. This is calibrated to our press'. Do your "office" people need to have color correct proofs/monitors? To me, this would be a prepress process where their equipment would have such functions. I would think that those people are more CSR types and would only have the need to print color pages if they were doing the preflighting. Of course, depending on the size of your company, the CSR's may also be the job planners and preflighters (is that a word?) at which point they would need a better output device to provide prepress with a more accurate piece.

As far as a viewing booth, I would think that replacing the bulbs in your current viewing area with a more color correct one (which you can find at most hardware stores) should be enough. If you have customers at your shop for press checks, they should be done at press anyway where they already have proper lighting.

I guess what it really boils down to is... how much money do you want to spend to equip customer service/sales/planner types so they can print in color? You mention "communication with the ultimate print provider", if you send your printing out, do you want to provide them with color accurate proofs that you expect them to match to or are you going to allow them to make the final proof? If you are a design firm and only sub contract the printing to several print shops, maybe you should leave the color matching to them since their devices would be calibrated to their press.

Since your question was pretty broad, my answer is also. I hope this, at least, gives you some ideas to work with.

 

[tmiller_iluvprinting]

Check out the Epson 4880 for office printing, along with GMG's Colorproof for the front end.
GTI offers excellent desktop viewing booths that have relatively small footprints and are cost effective. Check out the Epson Expression 10000XL scanner, I get high-end results with a scanner that costs less than $3000US! For monitor calibration we use the i1 Display from Xrite.
Best regards,
Todd