The Print Place has added creative versatility to its offerings with the Xerox Versant 80. Supplied by Cape Office Machines through Bytes Document Solutions, the Versant 80 gives The Print Place a production strength upgrade from a line of previous Xerox machines, lowering click costs while significantly improving quality, reliability and capacity in an already impressive service portfolio.
‘They say you can’t be everything to everyone but from a printing perspective we’re proving that you can,’ said Joppie Volschenk, The Print Place owner. ‘We have everything we need in two premises on either side of the main road to produce just about anything our customers need, from stationery and flyers to signage, wallpaper, books, labels, T-shirts, and laser cuts. We even used our CNC router to make motorbike parts for a customer!’
General manager Wickus Volschenk agreed: ‘Customers keep coming back to us because they know we get the job done faster than anyone else, at a better price, and with the quality they expect.
‘That’s why moving up to the Versant 80 made sense: it’s a much bigger machine than our previous printer, which we still use as backup,’ he said. ‘It’s also much faster and cheaper to run, and from a reliability perspective, we expect it to keep running far longer and with fewer issues. Downtime is not a word we use in our business.’
The Xerox Versant 80 features a high-definition 2400 x 2400 dpi print engine rated at 80 ppm for oversized media up to 350gsm, with single-pass duplex scanning at 200 images per minute built-in.
Other standard features include:
• Simple Image Quality Adjustment for pushbutton-easy image-to-media alignment, density uniformity and image transfer.
• An inline spectrophotometer and Automated Color Quality Suite to confidently and efficiently produce stable and accurate colour on every job.
• Compact belt fuser technology that applies the uniform heat and pressure needed to bond Xerox Emulsion Aggregation (EA) dry ink to a wide range of surfaces without slowing production speed, while optimising image quality on solids, tints and halftones.
‘Too many printing companies make the mistake of holding on to older technology despite its redundancy,’ said Cape Office Machines account manager Bryn Whithair.
‘The Print Place has taken a different approach by moving to the latest technology ahead of the curve, despite already having the equipment they need to meet their current demand. In this way they avoid the impact on their business that comes from upgrading to newer technology from much older machines, and instead take advantage of the newer technology to benefit the business and their customers.
‘To get to the point where The Print Place is now would be an incredibly high-risk investment for newcomers trying to enter the market as a startup. Because they’ve grown and adapted organically and have a solid spread of technology as a foundation, they can add smaller add-ons to their existing machines and offer even more products to their customers at a relatively low cost.’
‘Not only do we work directly for customers but also through dozens of brokers that are contracted directly by their customers, so we are constantly challenged to deliver the goods on multiple levels and in multiple quantities without fail,’ added Joppie.
‘Having proven technology like Xerox behind us is just the start. Different parts of our business also require different skill sets. The Versant is much easier to use than a litho printer, which requires very specialised skills, so it helps us balance our workload more economically aside from all the physical printing benefits.’
