New World Communications halves consumable costs with Oki solution

New World Communications, a specialist creative agency, faced an interesting problem at the end of last year. The company had the highly-specialised skills and IT infrastructure required to service its clients, but was struggling with high costs, and the inferior quality and poor performance it was getting from its current inkjet printers.

In looking for an alternative, Antonio Pereira, managing director of New World Communications, says the company started considering colour laser printing, which would offer high-quality results, more quickly with lower consumable costs.

After evaluating numerous options, Pereira says the company settled on the Oki C9500HDN printer. "This unit was far superior to the other units we looked at, meeting core requirements like accurate colour reproduction, compatibility with the Apple Macs, low-processing times and high-print speeds," says Pereira. "The fact that this unit allowed us to halve our consumable costs was, however, the biggest benefit."

"Typical jobs include the printing of artwork and design concepts for our customers to approve. We also need to print finished product mock-ups which can be photographed and used in the compilation of adverts before the product is manufactured, speeding up the design time of adverts so that they can be ready as soon as the product is launched," Pereira explains.

"In order for the printer to meet New World`s requirements, it had to be able to produce both A4 and A3 documents in duplex mode, since this is a key part of creating final proofs of brochures and artwork concepts," says Peter Vieira, business development manager at Printacom`s corporate solutions division.

"The unit delivered better processing and print speeds as documents could now be spooled to the printer for processing instead of on the Mac sending the document. The built-in hard disk was also critical to this speed improvement, since fonts were downloaded to the printer once and stored locally for future use," Vieira says.

While being satisfied with the printer was one thing, Pereira says New World found it important to partner with a company that would provide a full-service offering, assisting with the transition from inkjet to laser printing.

As such, Printacom`s corporate solutions division offered New World a complete solution for its environment. "As part of our service offering, we set the printer up for use by all users and computers on the network, while ensuring the right colour management profiles were used to deliver 100% accurate CMYK documents," Vieira says. The printer was also supplied with a three-year on-site warranty, which provides New World with a low risk printing experience.

"Overall, the entire design office has become substantially more productive since we`ve started using the new printer. Our design staff can now spend time designing and no longer have to waste time sorting out printer issues," Pereira says.