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Why Your Company Needs a Wide Format Printer
Published By: Eric Johannson | Thu Apr 21, 2022
Over the last several years, wide format printing has increased in popularity. New technological advances, flexible options, and cost-effectiveness are all major factors in this change in the print industry. While these printers were once seen as costly, slow, and finicky, now they’re the exact opposite. Wide format printers are user friendly and save companies money. Their versatility affords companies the luxury of expanding their marketing efforts and fortifying employee collaboration.
Every day, people are introduced to new companies via advertisements. We see posters, billboards, banners, and more with company logos and slogans. Brightly coloured, attractive prints invite audiences to engage with your brand in a memorable way.
As tempting as it might be for your marketing team to ignore print advertising, favouring social media instead, outdoor advertising in combination with digital marketing has proven itself effective. According to one study, approximately 98% of people see a billboard every week (Axiom). And billboards aren’t the only form of outdoor advertising that draws attention. Promotional vehicles with stickers, or printed posters and banners can all entice prospective clients.
Similarly, our reliance on technology for company group projects has pushed printing aside. But it shouldn’t be. For jobs such as engineering projects and architectural design, print is a crucial step. It encourages people to come together as a group and problem solve as a collective. What's more, producing prints in-house can pay for the machine itself. If you're outsourcing as few as 12 ArchD (24"x 36") drawings a month, the savings from printing internally on a 24" plotter would pay for the hardware!
Printing is essential for both your everyday operations, and also one of the more crucial aspects of reaching your target audience.
Learning about wide format printing and how it's valuable for your company could make all the difference in the world!
The Evolution of Wide Format Printing
Having a wide format printer readily available for your employees to use can be a relief. Allowing your teams to work together creatively and helping them flex their collaboration muscles. In doing both these activities, you’re encouraging employees to actively engage in learning about the overall vision of your company.
In the current age of printers, there are a lot of options readily available for wide format printing. But this wasn’t always the case.
There was once a time when large-scale printing wasn’t feasible in-house for companies. It was difficult to set up, took forever, and cost companies more money than if they just hired someone else to do it. There are a lot of reasons for this. But mostly, it came down to the technology itself.
Original wide format printers were designed with quality images in mind. And while this was great for companies wanting clean and crisp prints, these early wide format printers were unfortunately bulky and slow. Some of the first technology devices that accommodated large print jobs were called plotters. These devices often used pens to draw out the image in continuous lines (Computer Hope) rather than in a series of dots, the most common today with traditional printers. While the quality of plotter prints were high resolution, these devices took their time and tended to be expensive.
Plotters had many downfalls. One was the risk of running out of ink. Since the plotters used pens, the print jobs had to be completed with the hope that the ink wouldn’t run out halfway through. If it did, then the whole thing had to be redrawn. Not only that, but plotters also required tons of space. The original machines were often too big to fit in an office.
Luckily, the devices that are currently available have advanced beyond these early problems. If your company was hesitant about investing in one of these devices because of the things you’d previously heard about plotters, worry not!
Modern Wide Format Printers
Nowadays, wide format printing is reliable and efficient. The same crisp quality prints are delivered without all the previous downfalls of older plotter devices.
Wide format printers are much the same as your everyday printers, making them user-friendly and familiar. Just like the printers you currently use in the office, wide format printers offer conveniences and assist teams in bringing to life their creative visions.
Why Are Wide Format Printers Becoming More Popular
- Come in two forms, inkjet or laser printers.
- Can print on a variety of materials.
- Offer high-quality prints.
- And are more cost-effective than outsourcing.
Modern wide format printers are versatile and offer you a range of creative approaches to your marketing. They’re especially useful for printing things such as banners, posters, vehicle stickers, and trade show materials.
The same is true for blueprints and designs. Wide format printers can be compatible with softwares used for design drawings, such as Computer-Aided Design (CAD) and Computer-Aided Engineering (CAE). Wide format prints are of higher quality and lend accuracy to designs. With the ability to print your designs out to a larger scale, you’re able to get better measurements and notice small details that would otherwise be missed on a traditional print.
Above all else, these devices help you and your employees save time.
Saving Your Company Time
Something that’s universal for any company is meeting deadlines. Every project that you start needs a projected end date and pushing deadlines back could mean losing out on opportunities in your industry.
A tricky thing to navigate is outsourcing a part of your project to another company. The whole purpose of doing so is to increase productivity for your team by freeing up their time to refocus efforts, while at the same time keeping the flow of work moving steadily along. Unfortunately, outsourcing means you’ve now hitched your wagon to someone else’s deadline.
The secondary business that you’ve hired to manage your wide format printing needs, for example, could be backed up. Even worse, they could decide that your project isn’t a priority, and that they need to attend to more pressing issues. Suddenly the whole machine stops moving, and you’re stuck at a standstill hoping that you get the materials you need on time. But it’s not looking good.
Now you’ve got yourself in a loop of back-and-forth emails, empty promises, and a whole lot of frustration for you and your team.
Relying on other printing companies can lead to unpredictable hiccups that set back your projects and throw a wrench in your plans. Something that should have been done becomes delayed, and then every due date you had scheduled gets pushed back along with it. For marketing, this could mean missing out on prime opportunities for reaching customers during peak seasons. For engineering and construction, this could mean delaying work and having to get new quotes for materials that should have already been purchased and ordered.
You’re going to want to complete projects in a timely manner to preserve your company’s image, build a strong reputation, and take things to the next step. Losing even one extra week waiting on a large-scale print job could mean losing money and clients.
All of this could have been avoided through one simple solution.
Instead of outsourcing, your company should choose to have a wide format printer readily available for your team. One printer might not seem like the solution to all your office’s problems, but it really can be! Having a wide format printer in-office gives employees peace of mind when tackling major projects, which in turn will alleviate your teams’ stress and help strengthen collaboration.
We here at Carlyle are dedicated to accommodating all forms of printing for your company. We offer solutions for everyday printing of documents, and wide format printers for the high-quality, large-scale prints that your company and employees deserve.
On top of the devices, Carlyle also offers clients easy to manage solutions for their ink, toner, paper, and maintenance, available for both HP and Canon wide format printers.
To see what options are available for your company, browse through our wide format printers today. If you’re not sure which printer is right for you, Contact Us to speak with one of our knowledgeable representatives.