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It's one thing to purchase new equipment to help grow your business, it's quite another to have purchase new equipment to rebuild it after a fire. Such was the case for Chris Byrd, co-partner at Triangle Sign Co. in Durham, NC, whose business was almost wiped out by a fire two years ago.
"We have been in the sign business for almost 20 years. The fire we had in one of our buildings hit us hard. We lost all the equipment we had except for a Gerber Router that was in our other building. We pretty much had to start from scratch. We had to purchase all new equipment to get our business running again. It took a while to get everything back into place," said Byrd.
As they started to build the business back again they wanted to purchase a heavy duty high production printer. "My partner and brother, Zack (Jay), and I had been looking a few models when our outside equipment rep asked if we had seen the Agfa :Anapurna M that was introduced this year. I told him I wasn't that familiar with the product. I think he said that the name of the printer is coined from the mountain range in Nepal."
Byrd said that their rep showed them samples from the machine and they were really impressed with the unit's high quality. "The :Anapurna M prints at 720 and 1440 dpi, that's extremely high quality. I also liked the fact that it was both a flatbed and roll to roll model. In addition, the unit was in our price range."
The only thing that Chris needed to see was the printer actually working so he flew up to NJ to see the printer in action at Agfa's facility. "They demoed the machine for me. I brought with me some files of jobs we had run in the past and they printed them all out for me. The quality was fantastic. The high-quality printheads, very small drop size and the quality of the ink sets combine to produce vivid colors with smooth flats and great image detail. The text was also very sharp, that really tells you how good a unit it is. That demo sold me on the printer right there," he pointed out.
The 63-inch wide :Anapurna M industrial wide-format inkjet printer utilizes state-of-the art 14 picoliter printheads and Agfa-made UV-curable :Anapurna ink to make photo quality UV technology available to sign shops at an affordable cost.
"Agfa installed the :Anapurna M in early October and we were running out tests prints by the next day. It has proven to be a workhorse for us. We do a lot of jobs for the University of North Carolina and its helped us meet some tight deadlines for them."
Chris said he likes the fact that the :Anapurna M can handle both rigid and flexible media. "We print lot of PVC material on it. We can also produce a lot of one-offs on it as well for short run signs. It does whatever we ask it to do. It's a true industrial printer. I'm very pleased with the results so far," he concluded.
author: BY BILL SCHIFFNER