Richmond, Virginia-based Blueprinting Services of Virginia, a 28-year-old print shop, is drumming up some new business thanks to its purchase of a new EFI H1625 LED wide-format printer.
His business is not new to the world of wide-format, according to company president David Hinckle, but the EFI has added efficiencies it didn’t have before.
“It’s a time saver, money saver, and all that,” Hinckle told Sign & Digital Graphics. “We deal with a lot of architects, engineers and stuff, and they’ll do presentations with renderings and such and we would print these on (their previous printer) and then dry-mount them.
“So now, we just print it straight on to the foam core or whatever material they want us to print it on and away we go. The ability to do construction signage was something that we weren’t able to do easily. So all of that—it just gives us more services to sell.”
Hinckle says it was that ability to print directly onto substrates that finally sold him on the EFI purchase.
The H1625 LED is a 65-inch hybrid roll/flatbed inkjet printer that is the Fremont, California-based company’s entry-to-mid-level production printer. Its “cool cure” LED inks help EFI customers like Hinckle profit from lower running costs and the ability to print on high-value, specialty substrates that cannot withstand the heat of conventional drying or curing methods.
Konica Minolta Business Solutions sold, installed and provides training and support on Blueprinting Services of Virginia’s new printer as part of a recently expanded EFI/KMBS distribution partnership for EFI Wide Format products.
“We began as a reprographic shop serving the architectural, engineering and construction industries,” Hinckle says. “Clients used to come into the shop with a roll of drawings and ask for five copies. It’s not that simple anymore. Now, clients ask us to download a variety of files from various locations, assemble everything and run two sets.”
The new EFI printer joins the 4,000-square-foot shop’s other equipment, which include a wide-format KIP C7800, which the company uses to print a lot of architectural documents on in color; an Océ PlotWave monochrome plotter, which Hinckle describes as the company’s “workhorse,” printing more than 200,000-square-feet of material a month; and a Canon C700 imagePRESS color copier. The shop also has a Ricoh small-format copier.
“This (EFI) acquisition will benefit our business in a couple of ways,” Hinckle says. “It gives us the opportunity to offer more graphically rich and color-intense printing services to our (building) customers, and it also opens the door for us to enter the sign and display graphics market.”
He adds that it didn’t take long for printer to start paying dividends.
“The day KMBS finished installing our new printer, we were still running tests and I got a call from a customer asking if I could do construction signage,” Hinckle said. “So right out of the chute, we had a $1,000 job we would not have had before. The client needed the signs the next day, and we were able to help him out. Needless to say, he was delighted.”
Blueprinting Services of Virginia services mainly the Mid-Atlantic region but it also draws business from faraway states like Texas.
“A lot of times if they’re doing projects here they’ll find a printer close to the project,” Hinckle says. “They send their drawings in electronically and then we print them out and bring them to the job site. We do a lot of that type of work. It’s way cheaper to do it then it would be to ship drawings back and forth.”