Nov 12 2010

on Getting Started in Wide Format Printing – Part I

Published by at 6:23 am under Uncategorized

Originally published in Larry Hunt’s Wide Format News

Still haven’t taken the plunge into wide format?  What are you waiting for?  This is the biggest cash cow to hit our industry since the adoption of the copier in the early 80s.

Let me give you a kick-in-the-pants example: I bought my first aqueous wide-format printer during the summer of 2008 for our 10-person print shop.  It was an 8-color 44” Canon iPF8000s.  It cost us $7,000, we didn’t have any idea how to use it, and our sales staff wouldn’t proactively sell it until we proved to them that we could consistently achieve the quality our customers expect.  (Good problem to have, really.)  So, playing with my new toy, I hung on the wall a picture of my family on canvas, a banner for a church girls camp printed on vinyl, and a poster of the highest resolution image we could find online—a press release photo for WALL-E.  People came in from the street to stare at all three.  Experiments turned into referrals; referrals turned into corporate jobs; and we revenued $50,000 in that first twelve months.

You see, the glory of a growing market is that the supply and demand curves haven’t settled yet.  There is still a surprising disparity between the cost of printing and how much the customer is willing to spend.  Wide format printing is incredibly cool, and customers are willing to pay for it.  Artists still dream of giclées-on-demand, and every store with a handwritten sign wants professional signs…  Within a few weeks you could have customers eager to pay you a 300% markup, and thanking you for the privilege.

So if that sounds attractive to you, let’s define a straightforward plan for what you need to do.

First, define your market.  What do you enjoy printing?  Where is there demand?  One reason I generally advocate starting with an inexpensive aqueous printer is that I don’t expect most people will actually do this step, and aqueous printers can print just about anything.  You will need to know your current and potential customers and what their wide format needs are and will be.  A common and low-investment solution is to hang up signs for wide format printing before you buy a machine; then outsource all your wide format orders to a printer down the road until you have a good sense of where the demand lies.  No matter what deal you have worked out with the guy down the road, you’ll never make “wide format money” until you buy a machine, so don’t take too long at this step.

Next, decide where you’re going to put the printer and its supplies.  People often underestimate the footprint required for this process.  How wide of a printer do you want?  Because you’ll be printing off a roll, one dimension is virtually unlimited, but what is the maximum “short-side length” (roll width) you’ll be looking to print?  Standard answers will be 24”, 42”, and 60.”  The 42” is the most popular entry-level machine.  Add a foot or two to that width, then another 40” in depth, and you’ll have your initial footprint.  A laminator is just as large, depending on the type and accessibility.  And the printer will probably have a dedicated RIP, which will need its own desk or pedestal, which will minimally require another 3’x3’ footprint.

But we’re not done yet, because there is a whole new world of media to stock.  You will probably stock 20 rolls of various media and lengths along with their 42”x6”x6” boxes.  (I often found myself factoring in the toughness of these boxes when evaluating rolls, because I’d need a box strong enough to ship the product when it was all done.)  You’ll need a big area for a wide variety of samples and customer stock.

At the end of the day we got by comfortably with an 18’ by 5’ overall footprint, though I envy you who have a larger production facility.

Choose your ink process. Now that I’ve scared you, let’s move back to the vision of the machine itself and its potential.  Do you need an aqueous printer or a solvent printer?  This is the big question, because most people start with an aqueous printer and then doubt their choice for a few years.  Aqueous printers can be below $10,000, have extremely high resolution and color accuracy, but they’re not waterproof, and that’s a dealkiller for many.

If you’re aiming for outdoor signage that lasts more than 6 months outside, go for a solvent printer.  You’ll have to pay another $30,000 and it will smell like a pressroom.  Most of our demand was for posters, giclées, and short-term outdoor banners (SALE, FOR LEASE, GRAND OPENING, OPEN DURING CONSTRUCTION, etc.)

Choose a machine. Now that you’ve decided what type of machine you want, where it’s going to go, and the ancillary services you’d like to offer, it’s time to start researching specific machines.  Talk to salespeople, surf the web, and re-read your last six months of Larry Hunt Wide Format Newsletters.  Look at the websites for HP, Epson, and Canon; but also Mimaki, Mutoh, and Océ.  At this stage you may prefer to stick with a brand with a familiar interface, or if you intend on continuing on to more serious machines in the future, you may want to go with a brand that also puts out such machines so as to minimize your eventual learning curve.

Figure out your costs per square foot on each potential machine, and watch out for the cost of maintenance or spillage.  Again, if you think of these as big desktop inkjets, you’ll remember how comically high the ink and supply costs are for your desktop inkjet.

Choose how many channels of ink you want to support.  Most machines default to an 8-color version, but also sell 5- and 12-color versions.  They market these as achieving color accuracy targets for copy shops (8), engineering (5), and museums (12.)  But the biggest difference will be print-speed.  If you’re new to this, print speed may not matter, since the machine won’t be running a high percentage of the day, but if you intend your printer to be in a front-room where customers will expect prints on immediate demand, maybe the 5 is right for you.  We like to keep most things hidden to maintain the mysticism, and this was no exception.

Make sure it can do edge-to-edge printing.  This will save you a great deal of time.  I never did buy a 104” rotary trimmer because we bought a machine that could print full-bleed, so if I could just talk every banner customer into a 24”, 36” or 42” tall banners, it would save me 20 minutes of cutting.  Most of these printers will have an internal blade that will cut the “short” end also, so there is really no strong call for trimming of any sort, except for small pictures and signs, or when you’re ganging multiple jobs within the 42” width.  (This saves a lot of stock, so make sure your printer has a ganging feature—or you’re going to be printing a lot of samples in that excess space.)

Factor in whether each machine’s RIP supports postscript, Fiery, Pantone, etc. pursuant to your workflow.  This is where you ask about Mac vs. PC drivers, and part of your due diligence will be to make sure that the Mac drivers aren’t just dumbed-down versions of the PC ones.  Never factor in DPI—every printer you look at will print at far higher resolutions than the human eye can perceive, so don’t blackball printers that are only 600 dpi—they’ll look exactly the same as the 2400 dpi ones.  For that reason, even if they go that high, you’ll want to decrease resolution to save resources.

You will want an external RIP, because you will need more processing power and color accuracy than your onboard RIP will provide.  Because the RIP is external, the amount of memory on the printer itself won’t matter.  If, for example, you were to ask it to print a 3G TIFF, it would slow down the rasterization process inside the RIP, but it would print just as quickly.

Next month we’ll continue our roadmap, discussing finishing options, training and support, substrates, and pricing.  As always, if you have any questions or comments, feel free to call or email us.

 

Colin Jensen, MBA, would love to hear your questions or comments, and can be reached at colin colinjensen.com or 415-827-5630.

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