Brought to you by Insource Corp
Postmark’s 1170: Performance & Flexibility Combined

Equipment in the print industry can be frustrating, high-priced equipment often comes with great print quality and severe limitations. You can print incredible graphics on modern digital toner printers, but try to run a windowed envelope and you’ll melt the window unless you’ve paid extra. Thicker materials, rigid substrates, overly flimsy substrates, all out of the question. When the application fits, the quality is perfect, but the majority of printing equipment is not designed to be flexible.

The majority, but not all.

Happily, the Postmark 1170 Rapidcolor is capable of providing flexibility never before seen in the print industry. Built with the HP FI1000 printhead, Postmark’s flagship inkjet printer is capable of full-bleed printing up to 11.7” wide, all while producing consistent high-quality prints at incredibly fast speeds. Printing upwards of 12,000 #10 envelopes per hour is well worth bragging about, however the ability to adjust the printhead, up to 10” high, is where the flexibility comes in.

Postmark’s preferred Canadian distributor, Insource Corp, has installed several 1170 printers in the past four months. The variety of applications currently running across Canada speaks volumes not only to the flexibility of the equipment, but the tremendous ROI that the 1170 can provide your business.

Let’s start in Quebec at Imprimerie Maxime. A print shop that has served the Montreal area for thirty years offering digital offset and large format printing services. In recent years they’ve seen an increased volume in envelope printing, which brought the 1170 Rapidcolor to the forefront of their minds.

“We wanted to acquire a machine that would be dedicated to producing our envelopes,” says André Paiement, President of Imprimerie Maxime. “It is much faster and more efficient to produce our envelope orders. The simplicity and ease of operation greatly influenced our decision to purchase [the 1170 Rapidcolor].”

That simplicity and ease of operation is realized thanks to the Xitron Defender software that powers every Postmark 1170. Xitron’s software allows you to upload a PDF that has been built to the exact size of your substrate, allowing for perfect alignment on every print, all while allowing you to adjust spot colors as needed for perfect colour matching results.

Unlike some other printers, every job is set to the middle of the printhead. While the guides on the feeder move together, ensuring that every substrate you feed goes perfectly down the middle. This means that switching from one application to another can be done incredibly quickly.

Take, for example, Minuteman Press in Vaughan, Ontario. The owner of the store, Fred Lai, had long been looking for an envelope printer, but found it difficult to invest in a printer that could do just one thing. This is why he decided to add the Postmark 1170 Rapidcolor to his franchise, allowing him to run envelopes, but also add coasters, boxes and napkins to his shop’s repertoire, greatly increasing his potential return on investment for the machine.The robust feeder that comes with the 1170 is perfectly capable of running a variety of substrates up to 12” wide, envelopes are a breeze, but thicker materials such as coasters can be fed reliably as well. Once they’ve made their way off the feeder onto the transport conveyor, finger guides keep thinner substrates properly registered all the way to the printhead. Here at Insource we’ve successfully run materials as thick as 5mm through the feeder and under these finger guides with no issue.

Finger Guides & Post Guides: Clint Dixon

Another reason Fred is able to add napkins and coasters to his shop is the high-quality HP inks that are used in the 1170 Rapidcolor. Not only are they rated safe for food packaging, but they are also waterproof. No matter how sweaty a refreshing beverage may get on a hot day, the printed image on that coaster is going to be up to the task and look sharp the whole way through. There’s no doubt that feeding a napkin is a difficult task, a job for which a separate feeder is available. For smaller orders though, it is possible to hand-feed the napkins, or other substrates, while keeping everything properly registered.

Coasters in Feeder: Clint Dixon

If you remove the finger guides, post guides can be installed in their place. Switching over takes only two minutes and allows you to hand-feed larger substrates. Combine that with an adjustable printhead raising up to 10” high and you expand the capabilities of the printer very quickly.

That’s exactly what Cap-Pele Sawmill is doing on the outskirts of Moncton, New Brunswick. Though they’re not a print shop, they’ve still married the 1170 Rapidcolor to a unique application, printing directly to wood for displays on boxes of oysters.

“We only do oyster boxes,” says Jeremie Doiron of Cap-Pele Sawmill LTD. “We love how we can print almost anything on wood, it’s a very clean print.” Combine that print quality to the speed, and it’s easy to see why the 1170 Rapidcolor is the printer of choice when you need to print 6,500 wooden oyster boxes every month!

“The range of what you can do is really up to your creativity,” explains John Davis, Vice President of Sales and Marketing for Martin Yale, the group which owns Postmark. “Besides the usual applications we have customers that run wooden beverage coasters, customized high-end shoe and dress boxes for boutiques, to-go food boxes that include your family picture and name, beer and soda koozies, and event napkins for weddings or anniversaries.”

In the past four months, Insource Corp has installed four of Postmark’s 1170 into four different provinces, all running drastically different applications on the machine. If you would like to discover how the 1170 can complement your business by improving profitability on existing applications, or opening new revenue streams, we invite you to attend our Technology Summit on April 25th and 26th at our office in Markham. You will have the opportunity to see the Postmark 1170 Rapidcolor along with several other pieces of equipment that may be able to help your business become more profitable. Register today and we’ll see you in April!