Wide Format Imaging

The Gremley & Biedermann Inc. is a 70-year-old Chicago land survey company. In August 2003, the firm installed an Océ TCS400 color copy, print, and scan system. CAD manager Bob Tremblay shared his firm’s experiences with the machine.

“We are a land surveying firm, but we do large-format plat-to-survey exhibits, colormaerial photos, color digital pictures of projects in the field,” he explains. For projects such as these, detail clarity is crucial. “I think we’re more limited by how much pain we’re willing to suffer, especially on the photographic side, in terms of file sizes. That has more to do with our CAD requirements than with the output device.”

Speaking of job specifics, Tremblay explains, “We do a lot of raster images with AutoCAD, and we can move a lot of data across the wire to that machine quickly. I was glad to see that. It gets it off the draftsman’s desk and into the system, even if it takes a little bit to get it plotted.”

The company’s equipment array includes a color scanner, an Océ TDS600, and the TCS400 with a single controller on each of the two printers. A separate controller that is used to send scanned files to the TDS600. Tremblay says he considers the TCS400 to be a valuable addition to the company’s equipment mix. The operators found it to be quite user friendly. “We had no problems putting it in here and getting up to speed using it,” he states.

It also fared well in comparison to the printers it replaced. Of the two printers that preceded it, he points out that one was not really intended for the type of work the company produces and the other was just old. “The other machine jammed all the time,” he relates. “So when we got this one, the first thing we were sensitive to was, ‘How many times is it going to jam in a day?’ And I think I’ve seen one paper jam in the entire time we’ve had it here. So we were real happy about that.”

Another feature that proved useful was the twin-roll media configuration. “It can carry two different kinds of media,” Tremblay points out. “We’ve been through an entire set of ink cartridges in that time—I can’t tell you how many rolls or what types of media we’ve run through it. We mostly use the color bond and some of the photographic paper. We use the photographic paper in a presentation where we would mount it to a board. The color bond is our general output, but we have also used the color vellum, which works very nicely.

“It seems to load the paper better than other machines we’ve used. Paper handling, as you load the roll, seems to be automated and it seems to take it the first time, every time,” he says. That is also an area in which the TCS400 outperforms its predecessors at Gremley & Biedermann. “We haven’t had any problems on that score at all.