When it comes to wide format printing, how fast is fast enough? Printing technology moves in leaps and bounds and now it’s easy enough to find a competitively-priced printer that will achieve speeds of up to 100 sqm/hr. Like fast cars, fast printers are tempting but the question is the same – can you really justify a machine that fast for your daily needs?

It’s all about volume
High speed printers can make a real difference if you’re consistently printing a high volume – but they’re not necessarily the right choice for printers who value quality over quantity. It’s not rocket science to understand that print quality deteriorates with speed. If you print too fast, you’re likely to end up with banding, and inaccurate or inconsistent colours. If your clients are demanding the highest possible quality or smaller volumes, high speed printing won’t do you any favours and you’ll do better to pick a printer for the quality of its output rather than its speed.

Can you keep up?
A printer that promises a fast output can only achieve it with a fast input – and at this level, keeping up with your printer becomes one of the key issues. If your printer produces at 50 sqm/hr, that’s the equivalent of 28 roller banners an hour – nearly two a minute. Do you need to print at this rate? And can your staff keep up with it? Multiply that print rate across the week and that’s a phenomenal throughput of work.

It’s not just about sqm/hr
Comparing printers simply on the basis of the speed of output can be misleading. There are other factors to take into account. For example, there’s warm-up time – the time taken for the printer to be ready to generate a print. Some printers will do it in seconds, while others can take up to five minutes. If you print intermittently, this could be an issue and add up to a considerable amount of unproductive time. Paper handling is another function that you might want to consider. A lot of wide format printers use catch baskets underneath to receive the documents, which means sets of pages aren’t collated. Using a printer with exit trays that stack the output can be far more efficient than simply printing faster on a machine with a catch basket. It all depends on what you print most often.

Don’t sacrifice quality
In most circumstances, you need to provide high quality work to keep clients happy – and for this printing slightly more slowly makes sense. It’s only worth printing as fast as you can handle the output in post-production or finishing – any faster and you’ll have a queue forming in the print room and unhappy clients on the phone.

As we said at the beginning of this article, buying a fast printer is just like buying a fast car. The idea seems fun, but if you’re only doing the school run, that turbo-charged engine is unwarranted!