Equipment Rundown - Print

Equipment Rundown – Print

by M&S Windows in Blog at April 1, 2015

Now again again on the blog, we like to doth our cap to the tech-geeks out there (I’m allowed to say that because I am one)..

Recently we told you all about our new computers, today it’s the turn of our print department.

 

As part of our ongoing effort to provide the best in sales and marketing support, last year M&S took the leap into the world of DIY print. The project was headed up by our Marketing Manager, Sam Squire and overseen by MD, Mark Sansome. The aim was to provide quality, affordable prints for our clients and have the ability to print our own marketing materials too.

 

Research started with the main bulk of the operation, the printer. The research quickly showed that a ‘digital cipy machine’ (posh photocopier o you and I) would do the job well and not require a whole room dedicated to it. They’re also affordable and in some cases, including ours, lease-able. Marketing Manager, Sam visited a number of local printer suppliers and ultimately decided on a local company called Clarity Copiers. The guys there already actually supplied our main office printer and adding on the additional printer was a pleasurable and professional experience.

 

The printer we ultimately decided upon was the Sharp MX-2640N.

A great bit of it, easily capable of undertaking the work load we were going to be throwing at it.

printer

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

To ease costs we opted not to have the stapler, perforator and additional feature attachment. The printer is capable of printing full colour, oversized A3 (SRA3 for you paper geeks) pages at a very high quality and a respectable rate.

 

So far we’ve found the printer to be nigh on perfect for the job with very little qualms at all.

 

The rest of the print department consists of much smaller tools but some that are essential none the less.

The (nearly) full list is as follows:

  • Oversized A3 stapler for booklet stapling.
  • Corner pockets.
  • A vast array of paper sizes, thicknesses and types (we’ll save these for another post).
  • CD tabs.
  • Oversized A3 paper trimmer.
  • Paper bending machine.
  • Perforator.
  • Glue.
  • Adobe InDesign.

 

The approach to creating the final brochures, folders etc is somewhat manual but still within budget per print. We’re capable of producing around 20 folders or 50 brochures per hour, which is exactly where we need to be.

 

So, that’s roughly the story of out DIY print department. To sum up; we did some good research initially which is now definitely paying off. There is a manual element to the final prints but given the number of prints we are required to make, this is still within a timely budget.

 

As always, thanks again for reading. Keep an eye out for more geeky posts by me, Sam Squire.. soon!

 

 

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