Daryl Sutton, president of Eastward Sales, and Adam Garnett, manager, with their new Vortex 4200.
Like most wide-format printers, Eastward Sales in New Brunswick, Canada, has seen large-format paper AEC printing work shrink over the past decade.
“We’ve definitely seen a decline over past few years,” says Adam Garnett, the company’s manager. “More and more seems to be going digital and PDF.”
But Garnett has noticed something else: One by one, his competitors have dropped out of AEC printing altogether, leaving Eastward Sales with an increasing market share.
“The unique scenario here is that some of our competitors have pulled away from that kind of work, so now we’re the only ones in town doing it,” he says. “There’s still enough volume for us – some contractors don’t want to use their phone to price jobs, for example.”
And Eastward recently acquired a new piece of equipment that they call a “game changer”: a Vortex 4200 single-pass wide-format color inkjet. The machine was installed last June, and by early autumn, the company had logged 424,000 square feet.
The Vortex prints color and monochrome documents at essentially the same cost per square foot, making work like color CAD documents more affordable.
“We use it primarily for blueprints, construction documents,” Garnett says. “But we do some signage as well, and basic renderings.”
Last June he traveled to Mississauga, Ontario to see the machine at The Drafting Clinic, which began distributing the Vortex last year. (Click here to read about The Drafting Clinic.) A week afterwards, Drafting Clinic Imaging Manager Don Sams drove the machine over 1,000 miles to Eastward Sales and oversaw installation.
The speed of the printer is what attracted him, Garnett says. It prints over 20 times faster than a traditional inkjet at 42 inches wide by up to 50 feet in length. Garnett says he also appreciates its easy-to-use Windows driver and basic daily maintenance.
“It has allowed us to meet tighter deadlines and offer color services for clients who previously wouldn’t have considered them,” Garnett says. “Now, if a customer asks us first thing in the morning if we can have his blueprints ready by tomorrow, we usually tell him that they’ll be ready by noon that same day. In reality, they’ll likely be finished printing by mid-morning coffee break!”