Brightside Print & Design has bought a Graphtec F-Mark digital cutting system and anticipates being able to keep work in-house that previously needed to be outsourced, says sales director Laurence Hobbs.
“We wanted to keep work that we have had to send out in-house and so keep control of projects we are handling. We have always had inquiries from customers wanting us to produce prototypes and previously we have had to turn them away. No longer. And we’ll be able to produce A+ sized folders that we have had to send out. Our customers could never understand what we had to charge the same for 25 copies as for 100.”
The business in Stratford, London, set about looking for a digital cutting table before settling on the Graphtec machine, buying it from Ashgrove. “There were three key reasons for the decision: it offered real value for money; as we are in London we have to make sure that every square foot counts and the size of others counted against them; and we wanted to have an autofeed.”
The delivered price on the F-Mark is less than £6,000, far lower than some of the others that Brightside looked at. And no sooner had the machine arrived than it was pressed into service, cutting out hundreds of stickers. “We had picked up a job the day before the machine arrived,” says Hobbs. “And had the people from Ashgrove on standby.” They were not needed.
The job involved cutting out thousands of stickers for a job delivered to ten locations in batches of 1,000 each. The job was printed on its Ricoh Pro C7110X then fed into the F-Mark. Each sheet took 30 seconds to process, completing the job in 90 minutes running unattended and problem-free throughout. It has also produced swig tags and point of sale materials among the thousands of stickers that are going to be delivered according to Hobbs.
The Graphtec F-Mark takes a cutting and creasing information from an Illustrator file and uses an onboard camera to identify a printed mark to control register for the cutting head.
The company expects to bring in more value added work from high value business cards featuring multi-layered effects, to prototypes of packaging designs and folders. It matches the creativity possible on the Ricoh press using a fifth toner to print clear over.
Applied over metallic foils results in a spot UV varnish effect that enhances a wide range of work.
“Previously cutting was a process that would take a significant amount of time. Now like digital printing it can be almost instant. We should have invested sooner.”
