Printer with good registration?

Discussion in '8 ½ x 11 Color Laser Printers' started by jtoddm, Jun 21, 2012.

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  1. jtoddm

    jtoddm New Member

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    Hi there --

    We are a chocolate company that does lots of short runs of labels and would like to print them in house, but at high quality. We are working with a local printer to make us some professional labels on thick adhesive paper, kiss cut, embossed, etc with a blank area for us to print the custom text that changes fairly often. We would like to take these sheets of labels and print the custom text (e.g. batch number), so registration is very important to us as we need the text that we print to look correctly aligned with the rest of the label.

    Could anyone recommend a good printer that is:
    * High quality (good DPI, color, etc)
    * Good registration
    * Could work on slightly thicker than normal paper

    Speed is not an issue for us. Cost ideally would be < $2,000. Used would be great.

    Any advice is appreciated -- thanks!
     
  2. Joe Duffy

    Joe Duffy Senior Member

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    Do yourself a favor and let the local printer you are working with handle this. To spend less than $2000 for a "solution" will be tough.
    You will waste more than you think to get the text positioned correctly to run 1 or 2 sheets of labels if you don't know what you are doing.
    Just my opinion.
     
  3. jtoddm

    jtoddm New Member

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    Joe -- thanks for the feedback. Do you have any suggestions if we were to up our budget significantly (e.g. < $10k) ?
     
  4. xfactor printing

    xfactor printing Senior Member

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    How good exactly do you need the registration to be?
    A used KM 5500 / 6500 would register well.
    Is the base label offset printed? Will it be folded over the area where you are printing?
    A smaller printer may do it if there is some latitude. Can the design be modified slightly to make more latitude for slight paper registration errors imprinting the custom info.
    Another question - you mention embossing. That may or may not be impacted too.
     
  5. Joe Duffy

    Joe Duffy Senior Member

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    How many Labels do you paln to run a year?
    The 5501/6501 mentioned is a option but will require 230V power. If you are talking about running 500-1000 a month then a Oki would be fine and can be had for your budget.
    If you get a used printer, put it under a service agreemnet for the first year to be sure what you have. Parts can be expensive and get out of hand quickly
     

  6. jtoddm

    jtoddm New Member

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    @xfactor -- ideally we would like the text to line up with the rest of the label (both in terms of being straight) and having the right margins. So I think we would want the registration to be pretty good.

    The base labels would be offset printed on heavier stock adhesive paper and then kiss cut around the labels. As for the folds, the label is just for the front of our chocolate bars and doesn't fold over anywhere. We have flexibility in terms of the base paper, but if we are going to the trouble of offset printing, we like the look of embossing.

    @joe -- We'd probably need to print about 100,000 labels next year -- but the labels are 12 to a sheet, so that's really 1,000 sheets a month or so max. We have 230V power, so that's not a huge issue for us -- but space is. It looks like some of these printers take up a small room. I'm thinking maybe there is sort of an entry level small print-shop printer that has good registration?

    Thanks for all the help on this -- we are pretty new to printing and our needs are different than a lot of others. What we want is high quality, short run, last minute, and low cost, which I don't think really exists generally :)
     
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