Outsourced printing eats time and margin
Every revision means another trip to the print shop. The cumulative cost on a single project usually exceeds the price of a plotter — before counting the waiting hours and the delays in front of your client.
An engineering office prints more than almost any other sector, and reprints the same drawing after every revision. Its archive is not ordinary paper either — large-format drawings, with every project keeping a file that stays in demand for years after handover.
Every revision means another trip to the print shop. The cumulative cost on a single project usually exceeds the price of a plotter — before counting the waiting hours and the delays in front of your client.
The most dangerous thing in an engineering office is an outdated revision reaching the site. That is not a printer problem — it is the absence of a system that says which revision is approved.
Two years after handover a variation request or a legal query arrives, and it turns into a hunt through drawing drawers. Paper drawings also degrade from folding and humidity.
Work out how many metres you print externally each month and at what price. Most offices running two active projects find a plotter pays for itself within a year — and that is before the real gain: revising, printing and revising again the same day instead of waiting. If your printing is seasonal or light, we will say so plainly and not recommend buying one.
The imagePROGRAF range has two lines that get confused constantly. The TM, TA and TX lines are built for CAD: speed, precise lines and a sensible cost per metre. The PRO line is built for imaging and proofing, with a far larger ink set. An engineering office that buys a PRO is paying for colour accuracy it does not need. Ask yourself: are you printing presentation boards at photographic quality, or construction drawings?
Yes — Canon provides drivers and a plug-in for printing from AutoCAD and Adobe applications, with a size preview and paper usage check before printing.
Yes, and it needs a scanner sized for the format rather than an ordinary office one. We start with a sample of your drawings to determine the method and cost — the condition of older paper affects throughput significantly.
The media type, the ink coverage (a line drawing costs far less than a full-colour presentation board), and the device model. We calculate it on your real print mix, not on a worst case.
Talk to us and the ITCO team will recommend the devices and solutions that match your workload and budget.