Images_Digital_Edition_April_2020

www.images-magazine.com APRIL 2020 images 87 DIGITAL PRINTING It can outperform most of our existing printers Extra Mile Printing: Roland TrueVis SG-300 printer/cutter from Amaya Zach Newsome, production manager Tell us a bit about your business Extra Mile Printing grew from one printer/designer working in a small room with a heat press and a DTG printer. We employed our first member of staff in 2015 and now have extensive printing and embroidery capacity and a team of seven, including owner/ managers Beccy and Simon Lloyd. We have a retail showroom and adjoining production space in the heart of Cheddar, Somerset. We specialise in offering the full package to our customers, many of whom are small business owners and sole traders in need of a quality personal service to make them and their businesses look their best. What is the latest digital printing system you’ve bought? We added to our print capacity in November 2019 with the Roland TrueVis SG-300, which enables us to go to the next level of quality garment printing. It can outperform most of our existing printers and can print on many different media we couldn’t before, allowing us to extend our gift and photo product range and add wall decoration, for example, to our repertoire. For £7,500 it’s not a small investment for a business of our size, but it feels very worth it. Why did you choose it? We were recommended the TrueVis by our contacts at Amaya who have taken the time to get to know our business well over the 10 years we’ve been trading. We’ve bought all our equipment from them and they never fail to find the right solution for us. On this occasion they could see the benefit this printer would bring when they knew we were looking to increase capacity. They understand that a lot of our customers are tradespeople who need to wash their garments at higher temperatures and the TrueVis can produce print that washes up to 60°C. What’s it like to use? Do you have any tips on how to get the most out of it? The installation team from Amaya and Roland were brilliant, getting us up and running in an afternoon, but we were really able to get the most out of the machine following the day course run by Roland at its headquarters. The thing we’re most enjoying is decorating our showroom with digital media we’ve printed ourselves. This is a great way of showing off our new printing capacity to our customers and makes the space look great too! Is there anything you don’t like or would like to see updated? In the future we’d love to see improvements to the media clamps; they have to be removed and replaced regularly. We also under-estimated the space we would need to access the back of the machine when changing the media. We love the results this printer gives, but a major gripe would be the amount of media wastage when printing small runs. It’s a design feature to leave wider margins and avoid edge damage, which I’m sure will be addressed in future models as we’re all trying hard to reduce our waste and increase recycling, and these are difficult materials to recycle. What would be your advice to others thinking of investing in a printer/cutter? We can’t recommend the support Amaya offers enough: that would be our advice to anyone investing in a new printing system – their expert advice is completely invaluable and doesn’t end the day your printer arrives! www.extramileprinting.co.uk Production manager Zach with the Roland TrueVis SG-300