As the new franchise owner, Al Babicka was faced with two business issues at the start of 2003. Firstly, it needed to update its short-run colour equipment with an improved technology printer. Secondly, the franchise evaluated the requirement to be able to produce industry standard proofs, external to its colour plotter, without resorting to expensive chemical proofs before work was sent to offset press.
To address Snap Spencer Street’s proofing problem, Canon introduced its CLC1150. This device is capable of 11 full colour and 42 black and white A4 pages per minute and has a maximum paper-capacity of 3,850 sheets, as well as automatic duplexing. Married to a ColorBus RIP and combined with Fidelity software, the CLC1150 can produce digital proofs that are compliant with the 3DAP (Digital Data Delivery for Australian Publications) proofing standard.
The CLC5000 was also purchased, which features an output of 50 full colour pages per minute at a quality of 800x400dpi, and a possible paper capacity of a mammoth 5,500 A4 sheets.
Before Babicka would settle on keeping the CLC5000, however, he sent test files to a variety of vendors, with instructions to produce the output on a variety of competitive devices and RIPs. The results were surprising.
According to Babicka, the colour output results proved that while the CLC5000 undoubtedly remained the right choice for his franchise’s requirements, it was going to meet his needs best when used alongside a ColorBus RIP.
Babicka says, “People talk about ‘ripping once and using many,’ but sometimes we were ‘ripping many to use many’ and open to variation each time we did that. Canon put forward a solution that was cost-effective and fixed the entire problem for us.”
“Installing the CLC1150 has enhanced our proofing ability. In a rigorous printing environment where we can sometimes be sceptical of the use of technology, the CLC1150’s ability to produce colour accurately to the offset has exceeded our expectations.”
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