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Does Speed Kill?

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player

New Member
How important is printing speed to being competitive?

I had a printer that did a 4' x 8' panel in about 1 hour. I got a newer machine that prints that in about 1/2 the time. But newer printers will print that same 1 hour panel in minutes. Maybe seconds...

How do you cope with this? How is printing time billed or accounted for in your business? What does the future of sign making look like?

Any insights appreciated.
 
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Notarealsignguy

Notarealsignguy

Arial - it's almost helvetica
You would think it would all wash itself out? The machine costs more and maintenance is more but you also need to have the volume to feed it. That requires more sales expense, admin costs, larger facility, more people to finish, more to pack, more working capital to carry inventory etc. Now you need 1 guy there babysitting the thing where before that 1 guy could go take care of other tasks while the printer chugged away.
If you lower your price too much you risk increasing costs, overhead and stress to make the same as you could with half that.
 
Bradley Signs

Bradley Signs

Bradley Signs
I outsource all my big print jobs. I don't care personally, how long it takes, as long as it is done right, and delivered when you tell me it will be.
If I have to send it back, or it has to be redone, that's the last time I order from that place.
I schedule my work around what the printer tells me.
Like many things, speed is never as important as consistency.
I compare it to driving across town.
If you stay close to the speed limit, you get 99% of the green lights, it's a win for everyone.
If you go to fast, you race to the next light, and burn up extra fuel, brakes and time, and usually have to wait on all the other tards that raced by you.
As far as price, on the customer end, if I agree to your price, then we all win.
I charge what I see fit.
After 40 years of this trade, I see what others do, and hang close to that, but I'm not gonna give it away either.
It took many years to know my worth.
Oh, and the future is digital all the way!
I think there are some old methods that will hang tough for years to come, but printing seems to be the new wave of the future.
Trucks, planes, cars, railroads. All you have to do it tell them they need it.
This coming from a guy who hand lettered everything under the sun, included ships on the Great Lakes.
Never give up! Never Surrender!
 
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CanuckSigns

Active Member
I think it depends, are you running into a bottleneck with your printer? Is it running 8+ hours a day? for us, the bottleneck is always with finishing, I can't laminate, mount & trim a print to a board as fast as the printer can print it.

I agree with the other poster, in order to get a machine that will print these boards in a few minutes, you introduce a bunch of extra expenses, Large lease payments, extra staff, larger shop etc. all of these things add expenses to your business, so only you can tell if you would make more $ by upgrading your machine.

i would look at your processes first, if your not running your printer 8-12 hours a day, there might be some other things you can do to increase productivity like moving materials closer to the printer, optimizing your shop layout to eliminate unnecessary movement etc. these reviews cost nothing but your time.
 
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Andy D

Active Member
For me, print speed is about midway on importance of around twenty considerations when choosing a printer.
 
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Reactions: spb
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iPrintStuff

Prints stuff
I never really bothered about print speed until we got the Colorado. Now watching our mimaki CJV-30 print is like watching paint try. Most of the profiles that had a decent quality on the mimaki were approx 6 to 12 metre square an hour, whereas now the Colorado does anywhere between 40, 60 and 100 (high quality, production to high speed). With the options of 20 and 159 - that we don’t tend to use.

We haven’t adjusted our prices to account for all the time saved, merely just been able to upgrade our capacity. The other members are right about the extra capacity though, once we could offer higher quantities quicker we had to buy an XY cutter to keep up with the rolls and rolls of signage/posters we can do now.

I wouldn’t say speed is a top priority, but being able to print a 4’ by 8’ sign in around 2 minutes does have its positives lol
 
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player

New Member
My point is if your competitor is able to print 50 times faster than you, you are at a disadvantage. If he can print 500 times faster, how can you compete? This is considering they adjust their pricing to reflect the low print costs/times.
 
Christian @ Visual Graphx

Christian @ Visual Graphx

Active Member
player said:
My point is if your competitor is able to print 50 times faster than you, you are at a disadvantage. If he can print 500 times faster, how can you compete? This is considering they adjust their pricing to reflect the low print costs/times.
Click to expand...
This is becoming more and more prevelant. We recently upgraded from our FB750 and looked at many options. The one we settled on was the Vanguard VK300D-HS. This machine prints high quality images in about 2mins. The next comparable machine is the SwissQ at 3x the price. Everything we compared from Canon, Mimaki, HP, Roland, Ricoh, SwissQ, Durst, and more. Sure some have features ours doesn't but in the end compared to half that fields ours was faster at a higher quality, but it was also less money than almost all of them.

So the point is, tech is advancing but there are still high quality cost leaders in this sector.
 
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player

New Member
Christian @ 2CT Media said:
This is becoming more and more prevelant. We recently upgraded from our FB750 and looked at many options. The one we settled on was the Vanguard VK300D-HS. This machine prints high quality images in about 2mins. The next comparable machine is the SwissQ at 3x the price. Everything we compared from Canon, Mimaki, HP, Roland, Ricoh, SwissQ, Durst, and more. Sure some have features ours doesn't but in the end compared to half that fields ours was faster at a higher quality, but it was also less money than almost all of them.

So the point is, tech is advancing but there are still high quality cost leaders in this sector.
Click to expand...
Would you post the medium to high quality print speeds if you remember? I have been wondering what the newer machines are printing at. Square feet per hour?
 
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ikarasu

Premium Subscriber
We have two printers. Sometimes they'll run 16 hours a day... Sometimes two. As others have said, Printing isn't our bottle neck. Printing on 20+ (not even joking, traffic signs sound good on a roll to roll printer... But I find myself swapping media's 5-10x a day now) materials slows us down way more than the printers do.

I can print faster than I could laminate.... So we bought a second laminator that had roll to roll. Now I Can laminate while doing other things.

We started cutting roll after roll of material a day... So we bought a roll to roll cutter...now I can cut 3 rolls of decals a day, with 30 mins of labor loading and taping up the cutter.

Between laminating and cutting... At least 8 hours a day of one full time person is saved.

For the majority of us, print speed isnt as big as you think. If you're not falling behind on prints, or looking to add additional print capacity... It makes little to no difference, and just because you can print faster...doesnt mean your prints are cheaper.

Lets go with the 560 and the Colorado as an example. Printing per sqft is cheaper than you realize, labor wise. Lets say you're all generous and pay your printer $25 an hour. 150 SQFT an hour on 6 pass .. for a cost of 16 cents per SQFT in labor cost to print.

Colorado 1650 - 1720 sqft an hour. (Banner mode, most extreme case... but for my point itll do). 1.4 cents an hour per SQFT in hourly wages.

Huge difference, right? But 100% best case scenario you're saving 15 cents a sqft in labor cost... So you're not saving much at all speed wise. If you're losing jobs due to a 15 cent sqft pricing difference... You might want to re-think your pricing.


Now if youre bottle necking... Thats different. There are a lot of reasons to buy a high speed printer, Theyre great for many reasons - but the cost of running one and more expensive repairs outweighs the cost of labor you save... So IMO, speed doesn't kill.

If you're thinking of buying a high speed printer so you could lower your prices and be more competetive... Do a cost analysis on step by step for each process in your shop and see how much printing time really costs your company, I bet you could find other, cheaper options that would give a much higher benefit ratio than a faster printer would.
 
myront

myront

Dammit, make it faster!!
I'm surprised no one is mentioning the quality at these ridiculous speeds. Just like a cars horsepower figures are at the crank of an engine. factor in the energy consumed to get that power to the wheels it's usually about an amount 20-25% less than that number. The print speed rating is at a printers lowest quality setting. I would be willing to bet no one actually gets to print at that speed. We used to run a flatbed direct print to different types of rigid substrates. Sure it was faster but it relied on expensive UV lamps to cure and still would "flake" off from time to time. We then tried "frog juicing" (spray overlaminate). The print quality was horrible. After about 5 years that printer broke hard and would require upwards of 5-6k to fix so we purchased an HP360 Latex printer (roll substrates only). Same result - cannot print at it's advertised print speed without sacrificing quality.
Our bottleneck is having to change out media 3-5 times a day, laminating and finishing. We're now looking to get a second latex printer to alleviate having to switch out media.
 
Christian @ Visual Graphx

Christian @ Visual Graphx

Active Member
myront said:
I'm surprised no one is mentioning the quality at these ridiculous speeds. Just like a cars horsepower figures are at the crank of an engine. factor in the energy consumed to get that power to the wheels it's usually about an amount 20-25% less than that number. The print speed rating is at a printers lowest quality setting. I would be willing to bet no one actually gets to print at that speed. We used to run a flatbed direct print to different types of rigid substrates. Sure it was faster but it relied on expensive UV lamps to cure and still would "flake" off from time to time. We then tried "frog juicing" (spray overlaminate). The print quality was horrible. After about 5 years that printer broke hard and would require upwards of 5-6k to fix so we purchased an HP360 Latex printer (roll substrates only). Same result - cannot print at it's advertised print speed without sacrificing quality.
Our bottleneck is having to change out media 3-5 times a day, laminating and finishing. We're now looking to get a second latex printer to alleviate having to switch out media.
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This is no entirely true. Our vanguard Flatbed prints better than our Colorado and Latex at much faster speeds due to the smaller PL dot size and the resolution. The speeds I posted are far superior print quality than. Our Colorado or Latex printers and the ink durability is incredible, no flaking or scratching.
 
Christian @ Visual Graphx

Christian @ Visual Graphx

Active Member
Notarealsignguy said:
What would lead you to buy the vangurd when you said your fb750 was hardly used?
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The FB was hardly used for 2 major reasons. 1 we fought with HP for 22 months to fix a defect. 2 the materials it could print were serverely limited and the quality of output to throughput did not meet client standards when it was all said and done.
 
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