Wellington company The Colour Guy is a long-time user of digital printing equipment, but its installation of the Océ Varioprint 6250 has left it amazed with the machine’s quality, volume and reliability.
With a range of colour digital machines from Konica Minolta helping to drive its business over the last few years, The Colour Guy decided to make the move into high volume black and white print late last year, and had very strict demands in doing so. “The machine we wanted was really at the other end of the market from most of our other equipment,” says Craig Stone of The Colour Guy. “We wanted grunt and we wanted a footprint in the black and white market. With a lot of colour work goes black and white work, so it made sense for us. “We’ve got quite a lot of black and white volume and without a doubt we needed the best machine in the market.”The company carried out extensive research into the available black and white machines in the market, looking for something that helped set them apart: “Everyone has black and white, so we wanted something that would set us apart from everyone else, and we wanted something that was fast.”
After looking at all the available options, Stone and his team concluded that the best machine for their needs was the Océ Varioprint 6250. “Having gone down that road, we have never looked back. The machine won a ‘Beyond 5 star award’ from BERTL (an independent testing laboratory) and everything it said in that report was true, and more. I have never come across a more reliable machine.
“You throw a million impressions at it and it just looks at you and says ‘give me more’. It is just a monster.”
Stone says that the Océ Varioprint 6250 is the defining machine of its generation, setting the standard to which all other high volume black and white printers aspire.
Reliability was a key factor in The Colour Guy’s decision to install the Océ machine and it has not been disappointed. Having been up and running for almost six months, the company has only logged three service calls, all to do with general maintenance. All other calls were down to operators pushing the boundaries with what the machine could do.
“There is nothing in the market as good,” Stone says. “Each to their own and some people prefer the glossy look but as far as a printer’s dot goes, if you show a print off the Océ to an old school printer, they will tell you ‘that’s genuine print’.”
\The Océ machine has opened up new markets for The Colour Guy, allowing them to bring work in-house that previously needed to be outsourced.
“We are about to run a job that used to be done out because we couldn’t cope with it. It was going to take 381 hours printing time alone. Now, with the Océ Varioprint, we can do it in 53 hours. It means that, with long jobs, we are now able to keep quite a bit of work in New Zealand that would once have gone offshore.
“I’d be surprised if there were many digital printers, certainly around New Zealand, that would say we’re going to throw a 30 million impression job at a digital printer and be confident about the outcome.”
The environmental credentials of Océ are also impeccable – an important fact for a company as environmentally conscious as The Colour Guy. The company was runner up in award for the most sustainable business in Wellington in 2006, and made an appearance on television’s ASB Business programme showcasing its environmental side.
“I’m just doing everything possible from the purchasing side right through to educating the customer. If I can make the customer stop and think about the choices he is making, then I know I am making a difference.”
The exponential growth that The Colour Guy is experiencing with the Océ Varioprint 6250 is just one part of the company’s continued strong growth across the board. A strong backbone of Konica Minolta digital colour printers has been behind its digital strategy up to this point, and also seems set to play an important role into the future.
“Digital print is definitely growing. Very simply, we find that the more we market, the more work we get. I know some people say that it's a very hard industry to be in but I don’t agree. It’s very easy to get work out there at the moment. It’s a digital revolution.”
With a background in offset, The Colour Guy identified the growth in digital print and chose Konica Minolta as the supplier of its early digital machines, following an upgrade path with later releases as the digital market continued to expand.
“Our confidence just grew and grew with Konica Minolta,” Stone says. “They released a lot of good kit into the market and we took on board everything they released because we saw a market for what it produced – a saleable print which the customer liked and which we could produce cheaply.”
