Sameer Szaba
Member
Hey all
Been checking the site and was actually referred to this site by my younger brother and now production manager (since the machine came in) and wanted to ask quite a few questions actually but never been getting the time to get down to typing.
Where do i begin....well i've been running this company for the last 5 years, we started out on screen printing stickers and tshirts and outsourcing everything else from offset work, large format, vehicle branding, embroidery and everything "print & design" oriented. We were two designers by profession, one's left about 2 years ago. two years into the business we bought an old gestetner 211 machine to start doing small offset simple jobs in house (sold this only this year to help with the financing of the company - new machine and all) Along with that i've been in the design & print industry since 2000 and worked in large format, screen printing and offset print companies together with starting a company and closing down as well 2 years before we started this one.
And now i moved into owning my own Machine....now a lot of people here i think will criticise why i went for this machine for various reasons.....from the price i paid to "you should have started on a smaller machine and worked up or gone on lease" etc etc.
Reason i bought this machine was purely to be ahead of the game on quality and price. i am able to charge lesser than the medium and upper scale size printers and offer one of the best qualities seen in town.
i have no major complaints on this machine, however, i do have some questions, which unfortunately the vendor who sold me the machine cannot either answer the question or doesn't have the time to come and go through the questions that i have.....personally i think he's overwhelmed by the number of people he has to deal with so i'm just another customer.
So randomly, some things i'd like to know (and sorry i don't know these things and own a machine):
1. What's a click charge?
2. How can i determine the costing for a print based on the percentage of toner / developer / drum etc....currently i just asked what my vendor would charge, what my competition would be charging and charged slightly lower than the competition but higher than my vendor. Is there a software that can do this?
3. Imposition is currently being done manually, meaning i open illustrator, and for example set up my SR-A3 page, copy in my business card and set and repeat it to how many ups and put in my double cuts and trim marks (manually drawn on illustrator) and then send to the machine to print. Where can i get an imposition software that is not expensive and doesn't need me to buy a dongle....someone told me i can get an extension for quark xpress or indesign for imposition?
4. Duplex printing i know is possible, but for the life of me, i don't know where to start, what software i should be using before i send to the machine, how my file should be set up, what do i do the screen interface to start duplex print set ups and so on? What are we doing so far? Well were actually sending the file twice one side prints then we flip the paper and print the back, we adjust the register on the illustrator print interfaces x and y positions, usually moves about an mm or so.
5. Just today, my production guy couldn't print because he had software issues (we concluded) since the tech guy arrived and tested with his achine and it prints okay, while this is happening my manager tells me he tried updating the software from v.1 to v.3 and he checked online and "people" say that it shouldn't affect anything, having said that, easiest thing would be to uninstall what he has and reinstall the old software...guess what, we don't have it, its one of the things i've been asking my vendor for so i can install this on all the machines in the design and print computers...so...does anyone know where i can download a good version of this, mac version osx?
There's so much more, but, these answered would help me on my way to solving some of my issues, next up....numbering software for serializing printed material(someone called it variable data printing)...
Thanks in advance guys n gals!
Been checking the site and was actually referred to this site by my younger brother and now production manager (since the machine came in) and wanted to ask quite a few questions actually but never been getting the time to get down to typing.
Where do i begin....well i've been running this company for the last 5 years, we started out on screen printing stickers and tshirts and outsourcing everything else from offset work, large format, vehicle branding, embroidery and everything "print & design" oriented. We were two designers by profession, one's left about 2 years ago. two years into the business we bought an old gestetner 211 machine to start doing small offset simple jobs in house (sold this only this year to help with the financing of the company - new machine and all) Along with that i've been in the design & print industry since 2000 and worked in large format, screen printing and offset print companies together with starting a company and closing down as well 2 years before we started this one.
And now i moved into owning my own Machine....now a lot of people here i think will criticise why i went for this machine for various reasons.....from the price i paid to "you should have started on a smaller machine and worked up or gone on lease" etc etc.
Reason i bought this machine was purely to be ahead of the game on quality and price. i am able to charge lesser than the medium and upper scale size printers and offer one of the best qualities seen in town.
i have no major complaints on this machine, however, i do have some questions, which unfortunately the vendor who sold me the machine cannot either answer the question or doesn't have the time to come and go through the questions that i have.....personally i think he's overwhelmed by the number of people he has to deal with so i'm just another customer.
So randomly, some things i'd like to know (and sorry i don't know these things and own a machine):
1. What's a click charge?
2. How can i determine the costing for a print based on the percentage of toner / developer / drum etc....currently i just asked what my vendor would charge, what my competition would be charging and charged slightly lower than the competition but higher than my vendor. Is there a software that can do this?
3. Imposition is currently being done manually, meaning i open illustrator, and for example set up my SR-A3 page, copy in my business card and set and repeat it to how many ups and put in my double cuts and trim marks (manually drawn on illustrator) and then send to the machine to print. Where can i get an imposition software that is not expensive and doesn't need me to buy a dongle....someone told me i can get an extension for quark xpress or indesign for imposition?
4. Duplex printing i know is possible, but for the life of me, i don't know where to start, what software i should be using before i send to the machine, how my file should be set up, what do i do the screen interface to start duplex print set ups and so on? What are we doing so far? Well were actually sending the file twice one side prints then we flip the paper and print the back, we adjust the register on the illustrator print interfaces x and y positions, usually moves about an mm or so.
5. Just today, my production guy couldn't print because he had software issues (we concluded) since the tech guy arrived and tested with his achine and it prints okay, while this is happening my manager tells me he tried updating the software from v.1 to v.3 and he checked online and "people" say that it shouldn't affect anything, having said that, easiest thing would be to uninstall what he has and reinstall the old software...guess what, we don't have it, its one of the things i've been asking my vendor for so i can install this on all the machines in the design and print computers...so...does anyone know where i can download a good version of this, mac version osx?
There's so much more, but, these answered would help me on my way to solving some of my issues, next up....numbering software for serializing printed material(someone called it variable data printing)...
Thanks in advance guys n gals!