What to look for buying a 2-color offset press for less than $10,000

[osochi]

I am a newbie - is it possible to buy a good two color offset press on the second hand market under $10,000? ....or less...I have seen all wide variety of prices - what should I look for?
Thank you

 

[Jeff]

This is not my area of experience, so hopefully someone else will jump in and give you better advice.

To get the discussion started, what kinde of jobs will you be printing?

I thought about getting a low-end ryobi 3302 as the price is very low for these as well as machines in the class of the ABDick Century 3500s; our use is a mix of text and photographs with some very easy to print pages, and some with larger solids. However in the end I decided it would likely not achieve the quality I was looking for (screen and registration quality matching our digital output) when doing process color work on a press like this and especially for heavy full-coverage pages like covers, so I'm holding out until I can afford a used GTO.

 

[xpquickprint]

If they're too bashful to post here for some reason, you could also send a private message to those who post equpment for sale in http://www.colorprintingforum.com/offset-digital-presses-for-sale/ -- you'll notice that most of the press for sale ads are posted by people with a lot of different presses for sale.

 

[auchprinting]

Sounds like the kind of work that you are printing should be printed on a larger press Heidelberg, Man Roland. A Solna prints a soft dot and would not be any good.