Printer Review: Mutoh Falcon II Outdoor
By Karen Lowery Hall
Last
March, Color Key Displays in Loveland, CO installed a Mutoh Falcon II
Outdoor printer, marking the company’s first experience with a
solvent ink printer.
According to graphic designer and production manager Blais Hunter, the experience has been positive. “It takes a little bit to get used to if you’re not familiar with the printer,” he admits. “I can control everything that’s going on with the printer,” he explains. “On some printers, you don’t have control of the heat. And on some media, if it’s too hot, you get lines or banding. If the heat’s too low, you get puddles of ink. So being able to change the heat is great.”
Color Key Displays is putting its new acquisition to work on all types of outdoor jobs. “We’re using it for outdoor signage, vehicle wraps, stickers, decals,” Hunter lists.
He is hoping to work even more efficiently soon. The company has ordered the optional feed system that mounts to the back of the printer. “Some of the banner material we get comes in 500' rolls that weigh up to 200 pounds. Once you put it on the printer, the rollers have a problem moving the media forward because of the weight. This will help solve that problem,” he states. Hunter would also like to have a contour cutter for the printer.
Lori Beaty is the owner of Color Key Displays. She relates that last year, the company had a flatbed printer on a trial basis. “After running all the numbers and looking at my market, I decided that I could do everything except the very special pieces on the Mutoh that we could do on the [flatbed] for about an eighth of the price.” She also preferred the print quality of the Falcon II and the fact that there were more media choices available. “That opened a new market for us to do the vehicle wraps,” she points out.
After installation, Beaty found another aspect to admire in her new machine. “When people are pricing me against Kinko’s, I used to always get beat out because I was running an HP5000,” she states. “The Mutoh is way cheaper to run, so it’s more competitive and is starting to give us a little bit of an edge.”
Having only had the machine since March, Beaty is still in the process of working out the exact cost of running the printer. Her main concern is ink. “We are flying through the ink and it’s about $155 for the two cartridges—we’re running the two CMYK,” she notes. “With the HP5000, I’d order ink maybe once every six months. Now, I’m ordering it monthly. So I can’t really do a complete cost analysis until I have about six months under my belt.”
She also points out that when the technician came to install the machine, all the modifications that had to be made to accommodate it were included in the price and everything was up and running in a very short time. “What’s important to me,” she states, “is that the machine, out of the box, is ready to go. We were producing with it almost immediately.”
Landing the Big One
Across the country in Bayshore, NY, the team at International Patterns is also pleased with the Falcon II Outdoor. So much so, in fact, that the company bought two of them. Paul Pensabene, vice president of sales and marketing, and Shelley Beckwith, executive vice president, agree that the ability to run this printer model virtually hands-off for long periods of time was the key to landing a major account.
The company is a beta site for Mutoh and had been using the Toucan printer. When the need arose to produce more outdoor work, the decision was made to purchase a Falcon II. The first Falcon II was installed in October 2003. “It services a sector of our business that we have to provide banners, signs, and printed products very quickly. It’s a large retail account and every day, I get 40-50 orders from them that need to be sent to their customers. Whenever we wanted to make a banner for outdoor use, we had to either laminate it or use another technology for it, but the Falcon is made for outdoor use. It doesn’t fade under UV lighting. It doesn’t scratch off. It has a good three to five year life. So now I don’t have to laminate; I can just print and go. It’s made my life a lot simpler,” says Beckwith.
She adds, “It was a less expensive machine and the substrates and inks for it were comparable in cost. It’s fast with very high resolution—it was even faster than the old Toucan and the resolution on it was better, which is an odd combination because usually if you go faster, you don’t get better resolution. It’s a better engineered product.”
“This ability to do this large-format digital printing with this resolution at this cost enabled us to get the largest order we’ve ever received,” Beckwith relates. “The account is KFC. Within the last few weeks, they have changed all their menu boards in all of their stores, domestically. The new menu boards are very high design—they’re a real departure from the traditional fast service menu board. It’s backlit with strips. These are magnetic boards; they’re three-dimensional with extraordinary graphics and beauty to them. All the printing on those boards was done on the Falcon II.”
International Patterns shared the job with one other company because it was too large a job for one outfit to produce in the time required. Pensabene explains, “Keeping to the timelines that KFC required, we looked at our resources and realized that we needed to bring in an additional printer. Our choice was the Falcon because it would give us the speed and the resolution we would need. So by bringing in this additional equipment, we would be able to produce the quality and be able to deliver on time so the menu boards would be in-store as they broke their advertising program.”
Beckwith agrees that the rush nature of the huge job was crucial. “The order itself had to be done in a very short period of time and no single company could have done it, so we got half the order. To get it, we had to compete with eight manufacturers. One of the ultimate edges in our getting it was the fact that we had the flexibility in printing that the Falcon provided. Each board can be customized to a high degree, and this machine gave us the ability to do quick, on-the-spot changes.
“The Falcon II is what ultimately enabled us to get the order,” she concludes. “It’s a real success story.”
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