While most companies are undergoing a digital transformation, paper isn’t going away anytime soon. Countless businesses still rely on paper documents, and some frequently print brochures, flyers, and other graphics-heavy materials in large volumes. If your enterprise fits that bill, then chances are you’ll need a production printer as part of your print fleet.
Production printers are machines that, under the right circumstances, can help businesses improve their productivity and greatly expand production. Read on to discover the benefits they potentially offer, and whether or not your business can benefit from an on-site printer.
What Is a Production Printer?
Production printers aren’t your ordinary desktop office printer. These machines are tailormade for high-output volume printing, with basic “Tier I” machines capable of printing 65 pages per minute. Many high-end “Tier III” models can churn out over 300 pages per minute of black and white print and tackle volumes of up to 10,000,000 pages per month under ideal conditions. Simply put, production printers have their multifunction printer cousins beat when it comes to output and volume.
Take one look at a production printer, and it’s easy to see the huge difference between it and your average multifunction device. These are large machines that need plenty of floor space to function properly. Production printers also offer many inline finishing options that are often lacking in even the fanciest of multifunction printers. Such features include ring and wire binding, cover interposer, booklet making, multi-folding units, and trimmer units.
As hinted at earlier, production printers are often categorized in “tiers” according to their production speed, volume demands, and finishing options.
- Tier I production printers offer basic functionality with speeds of up to 80 color pages per minute, volume demands of 100,000 color pages per month, and basic finishing options. These machines are a common choice for businesses that need significantly more print volume than multifunction printers can provide but aren’t too concerned about print quality.
- Tier II production printers can produce more than 500,000 color pages per month at speeds of up to 90 pages per minute. These mid-tier machines offer a few more finishing options than Tier I printers and are a go-to option for larger organizations that demand effective printing options for bulletins, flyers, and mailers.
- Tier III production printers offer the fastest production speeds (up to 100 pages per minute in color and over 300 pages per minute in black and white). These units are also capable of tackling high-volume printing tasks with high image quality. Tier III models also offer a full range of inline finishing options.
The Big Business Benefits of Production Printers
- You’re in control of your printing needs.One of the sticking points with outsourcing printing is surrendering quality control to a third party. Doing so limits your choices while adding undue worries about how the end product turns out. Production printers put the ball back in your court by giving you complete control over the printing process, with a multitude of quantity, quality, and finishing options to choose from.
- You won’t have to make trade-offs between speed and quality. With a production printer, you’ll never have to sacrifice quality just to make a deadline. These printers are not only fast, but they´re also capable of producing high-quality prints with satisfying results.
- Production printers offer better security and compliance. With a multitude of security features, you won’t have to worry about your content being compromised. Having a production printer in-house also helps with regulatory compliance since there’s no longer a need to outsource print jobs with potentially confidential or proprietary information. Although third-party vendors are not likely to deliberately share such information, security breaches can still happen.
- Production printers make your team more productive when compared to standard or multifunction printers. This is especially true for paper-intensive businesses that often require high-volume print jobs. A production printer’s fast output frees your team to tackle other projects between jobs.
- User-friendly controls make production printers easy to use. They may look complex, but production printers are explicitly designed with intuitive controls to make even the most complex print jobs relatively easy to perform.
If you’re thinking about production printers for your Wisconsin business, then contact Wisconsin Document Imaging today and one of our specialists will be happy to discuss your options.