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Large format printers can be very beneficial to your printing business, allowing you to offer a huge range of services to your existing clients and do much to help you find new ones. The appeal of being able to create banners, signs, posters, and even blueprints and vehicle wraps could turn a few heads and have additional orders appear quickly.
Investing in top-quality equipment also sends a message out to your client base that you are intent on taking things forward, something that can make you stand out from a crowd that might be tightening their belts in the current financial climate.
You will need to put a maintenance program in place
Although they are neither as bulky nor expensive as many people believe, you are still making quite a big investment when you buy a wide-format printer. As with any large expense, you will want to protect that investment through regular maintenance. While it would be wise to have it serviced regularly by professionals, you should also follow specialist daily maintenance tips for large format printers.
Doing this will prevent unnecessary quality issues and could even prevent an expensive breakdown. This expense won’t just be incurred in the shape of a repair bill, but also in the damage to your reputation caused by you missing a customer deadline. In short, failing to maintain such a key piece of equipment could have a disastrous effect on your business, and just crossing your fingers and hoping for the best is unlikely to work out well.
You will need to check compatibility and software requirements
As an established printing business, you will already have many working practices for the work you do every day. This will include design and proofing, and it all uses equipment and software that will now have to work with your wide-format printer.
This means you will have to look at compatibility, especially regarding software, and make sure you are looking at getting updates or bespoke fixes in place as soon as possible. This is something you should have ideally looked at before getting your new printer onsite, but as you may have discovered previously, you won’t know exactly what is needed until you try everything together in a real-world situation.
You will need to source a new range of consumables
Not only will you need the right inks for this new printer, but you should also make sure that you can source all of the new mediums you will be printing on. As this can include vinyl, wood, and metal as well as the usual different grades and types of paper, you will need to allocate additional storage spaces, especially if the most economical solution is to buy in bulk.
Final thoughts
Buying a wide format printer can do much to elevate your business, but you need to make sure you have some vital things in place. At the top of that list is a maintenance program, that safeguards your investment. You will also have to integrate the new equipment with what you do now, and make sure all of the consumables that you printer will need are available to cope with the extra orders that your new printer could bring in.