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When asked if he is pleased with his most recent printer purchase, Mark Brown, owner of Mark's Quick Printing, St. Louis, MO, gives an emphatic "Yes." Last fall, Brown installed the new Mutoh ValueJet 1204, a 48-inch eco-solvent printer at his location with some very profitable results.
"I had been looking at a number of printers on the market that would take us to the next level. Then I saw the Mutoh ValueJet 1204 at a trade show. We already had a Falcon in house so we were familiar with Mutoh products and their capabilities. I liked the quality of the output of the 1204 and the various media it was capable of printing on.
"Since its installation in October, my staff and I have been blown away by the unit's ease of use, speed, and quality."
Brown's shop is pretty much a full service business, offering screen printing, offset, and signage printing and more. "Our print shop is a full service output provider, which means we can do just about anything. Having the ValueJet in house has allowed us to take on a lot more work that we had to turn down in the past because we weren't able to provide as quick a turnaround. So, previously outsourced jobs are no longer an issue for us. Thus far, we have produced numerous jobs on it and our customers have been impressed with the quality. This piece equipment sets us from almost all of our competition in our area and has become a strong profit center for us," said Brown.
Brown has high praise for Mutoh's Intelligent Interweaving Printing Technique, which allows for increased print speed that virtually eliminates banding with exceptional image quality. "This new technology takes banding out of the equation. This feature is revolutionary in the piezo printing application world and comes standard on the ValueJet 1204. Intelligent Interweaving increases the accuracy and consistency of dot size and dot release during printing. The quality is really superior to many other models out there. We are running everything on it from t-shirts to signs and banners," said Brown.
Brown adds that the ValueJet provides additional productivity without compromising image quality by offering 10 print modes including the new 540 x 720 dpi mode that is perfect for jobs such as banners. "The 10 print modes allow for a wide range of printing possibilities on a variety of inexpensive, uncoated media. You can print on a host of different substrates like vinyl, fabric, even reflective. The amount of money that you can save on the material you print on is also a big plus and now we can take on jobs that other people don't want to do. In addition, some of the signs that we were doing by screen in the past we are now doing on the 1204," he pointed out.
Brown also like's the unit's size. "It doesn't take up a lot of space and that helps when you are in a small location. That's a major plus. It fits perfectly in our shop."
author: BY BILL SCHIFFNER