Would you share some time to talk about the available markets and equipment?

Do you know of any really good sites to view and puchase equipment?

Please answer if you have the answers to any of these questions...I recently checked out a digital conference (in Dallas Texas)and can't get the technology out of my mind...to say I was impressed would be an understatement.

What kind of digital printing are you looking to get into? After a call that I got today, I may be adding a wide-format inkjet printer to work along side our Edge.

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:) Design is Everything! :)
Glenn Taylor
in beautiful North Carolina
http://members.tripod.com/taylor_graphics

walldog@bbnp.com

Then call the local sign shops and see how many of them already have digital printing equipment.

Stop in the local Kinkos if you have one and see if they are offering it.

It is the objective of equipment manufacturers to sell equipment regardless of market saturation. If your area doesn't have many people already providing the service, it may be worthwhile looking into. If there are already lots of shops offering it, perhaps you could sub out the work to one of them until you generate enough volume to justify the equipment purchase.

You will especially want to compare the cost of making a finished print including any necessary lamination or clearcoating (and the cost of that equipment) from one manufacturer to the next. There is a very wide range of cost per square foot. This is based on the cost of "consumables" such as inks or ribbons or toner, paper or vinyl or canvas, lamination films, software to run it, and hardware.

Another consideration is the depreciation of the equipment. What's the warranty length. What's the life expectancy of the print head? Some digital printers have a fixed print head and others have the print head built into the ink cartridge.

There is a lengthy learning curve involved with digital printing. You will be dealing with new (to you) software and equipment, new terms and processes.

Some colors just cannot be matched through digital printing, just like some colors can't be matched using paint or using vinyl. When the customer sees what you have digitally printed for them on that expensive material with that expensive ink or ribbon and then laminated it with that expensive laminating film, and all they can say is, "That color is way too pink, this is not acceptable" guess who eats it? You will need to advise customers in advance about certain limitations.

I'm not being negative about things from speculation. I owned a Novajet II inkjet printer shortly after they came out. It was a great tool and it was lots of fun making prints on it. Did I make money with it? A little. Once I got past the learning curve though, it seemed like everyone and their uncle had one and were dropping the price of prints just to get work.

Most of the franchise shops either already have this equipment or they have a network where they get it from someone who has agreed to supply the franchise with prints at a specific cost.

Think about what you want the equipment to do. The inkjet printers do great work with posters loaded with wording. There's no weeding vinyl on tiny letters. There's no smelly screen printing inks. There's no tedious hand lettering. They can produce 4 color photographic work in one layer. Vinyl can't do that. They can print inlines, outlines, drop shadows, prismatic, multi-color lettering faster than you can create it in your software.

Pay attention to print life expectancy. UP TO 6 months or 2 years or 3 to 5 years and under what circumstances? A good site to look at inkjet fade results using various inks on various papers is http://www.wilhelm-research.com

Good luck in whatever ya decide Monte :-)