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Canon Legacy
Rival equipment
No such thing as a typical day
Unexpected bonus
The Canon Difference
This Brookvale-based printshop replaced a five-year-old machine with a much more capable printer - and halved its costs of ownership
"We've had the machine for three or four months now and made 200,000 impressions - probably about 20,000 of which were in colour?"
? Steve Barber, franchise owner, Worldwide Online Printing (Brookvale).
Worldwide Online Printing seeks to offer customers throughout Australia the most advanced design and printing service in the world. Whether a customer requires specialised PMS or process colour, digital or large poster printing, the design and print specialists from Worldwide Online Printing can involve themselves in the job from start to finish.
According to Worldwide Online Printing, it is very proud to be able to offer the most advanced high-definition printing available today from manufacturing hubs on both the east and west coasts of Australia.
Canon Legacy
"We've been Canon users since we started here in 1988 and bought the first model CLC1," said Steve Barber, franchise owner of Worldwide Online Printing Brookvale. "From there we've always made sure we've had colour Canon printers in the business. From the CLC1, for example, we went to the CLC500, then the 700, 800 then finally got the CLC1000 that replaced everything we had bought from Canon up until that point in time."
The CLC1000 served Worldwide Online Printing Brookvale for five years, completing 750,000 impressions before it was determined that it was getting too expensive for the business to run in the wake of newer devices which had arrived on the market.
"Canon was very accommodating and helpful in solving this financial issue for us," said Mr Barber. "We initially asked Canon, 'Can we refinance what we owe on the CLC1000?' and we couldn't because the machine was too old. Canon's solution was to offer us its iR C3200, which not only gave us a new machine, but repayments that were almost half what we were paying."
Rival equipment
During this process of negotiation, Mr Barber concedes that he also looked at equipment from another manufacturer - widely used throughout other Worldwide Online Printing franchises.
"I looked at the device being used by other stores and noted that it was already a couple of years old, whereas the iR C3200 was brand new," said Mr Barber. "Further, this particular machine only does 12 pages a minute in colour and 50 in black and white. Now, when you're coming from a CLC1000 that, despite its age, could do 30 copies a minute in colour, you just know that production would slow dramatically - and you can't afford for that to happen."
When Mr Barber enquired about the next model in the vendor's range, he was impressed with its specifications - but not with its price tag, which jumped from around the $50,000 mark to $300,000 within one class of printers.
"Canon stepped in with the imageRUNNER iR C3200, which can do 32 colour copies a minute. It's approaching the speed I was familiar with from the CLC1000, but is only faction of the cost including the Fiery RIP," said Mr Barber.
No such thing as a typical day
Since the installation of the iR C3200, staff at Worldwide Online Printing have found that there's no 'typical' printing job from day to day. Instead, they have met quite a cross section of different colour printing needs with the device.
"We could be using the machine to print anything from postcards to menus to flyers," said Mr Barber. "Sometimes people want business cards in a hurry and we've been using the iR C3200 to turn those around quickly, too."
Another recent job completed by Worldwide Online Printing was a manual for a publishing company. While the internal component of the book was printed in black and white, Mr Barber found that he was able to print the cover on SRA3 - a large sheet of oversized card that couldn't have been fed through the old CLC1000 - which meant the manual has an impressive full colour cover. Mr Barber commented that prior to acquiring the iR C3200 they would have had to send the covers to another Worldwide franchise for printing.
Unexpected bonus
One of the first things Mr Barber noticed about the iR C3200 is that it employs a new printing technology that doesn't use fuser oil. For this reason, Mr Barber noted that copies didn't have the same kind of glossy finish that he had experienced with past printers. However, he has found that customers quite like the effect.
"Another benefit of not having fuser oil in the machine is that you can colour copy letterheads," explained Mr Barber. "In the past, if you copied a letter head on a fuser oil machine, you couldn't put the paper back through a laser printer or copier because it would melt the design and make a mess inside the machine."
The result of this is that if a customer requires letterhead, the staff at Worldwide Online Printing can immediately print out a small quantity on the iR C3200 for immediate use, while sending the rest to offset which typically takes about 10 days to complete. Previously, the customer would have to wait the 10 days, without any letterhead to use in the meantime.
In a similar vein, staff at Worldwide Online Printing have found that they can run labels through the iR C3200 without any problems. At a recent franchise meeting, Mr Barber was surprised to hear many colleagues bemoaning that labels were coming adrift in their machines purchased from a rival vendor. Mr Barber attributes this to the newer technology in the iR C3200, including the lack of fuser oil.
"At the end of the day, labels aren't a big thing, but it's just another service we can offer in the store," said Mr Barber. "Another string to our digital printing bow."
The Canon Difference
"The response from Canon since we bought the iR C3200 has been excellent," said Mr Barber. "I now buy all my paper from Canon as well, and they obviously have someone in their sales department who is very switched on. If I rang up to say I needed some 250gsm card stock fast, for example, they will put it on an express courier. There is an extra fee for that, but if you have a customer waiting, you're happy to pay it."
Staff at Worldwide Online Printing also enjoy using the iR C3200. Compared to the CLC1000, the iR C3200 is a dream to operate, and it allows creative staff to use more varied paper stocks to complete their jobs. Mr Barber jokes that the iR C3200 is so forgiving with its use of stocks that you could probably put a piece of breeze board through it. This flexibility is very useful - particularly when it comes to business cards, where customers always want to use thicker stock.
"We've had the machine for three or four months now and made 200,000 impressions - probably about 20,000 of which were in colour," said Mr Barber. "It's always in use, so the capability of the machine has increased our turnover. I can't say to what extent, but it's clearly a lot easier to use than the old machine - and the fact we can send data from the Macs or PCs ensures it's being used more and more. It's the workhorse in our shop."
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