The printer, which cost £15,000, was installed in early September on the same day that Signs And Lines also installed a Mounter’s Mate laminator. Total spend for both was £25,000.
The TrueVis joins a seven-year-old Roland DG SP-540i in Signs’ all-Roland setup. Managing director Mike Andrews said the efficiency of the SP-540i was a big factor in his decision to stick with Roland.
Andrews said: “We were looking around at a few different machines and then we saw a demo and considering we’ve got a Roland already we were quite impressed. The print quality is very good, it has got really strong vibrant colours and is really everything we want in one machine.
“I’ve always liked Roland, it’s a well-known name in the market. We briefly looked at others and were briefly looking at a Mimaki flatbed but decided that it wasn’t for us. We will look at getting other kit from Roland in the future, some of its smaller flatbeds might be the next thing we invest in.”
The TrueVIS, launched earlier this year at Fespa Digital, prints in eight colours: CMYK plus white, light cyan, light magenta and light black.
It is suitable for a range of work, including posters, graphics and decals and runs at up to 8.3sqm/hr.
Andrews said it had been particularly helpful in servicing an influx of new wall vinyl jobs that Camberley, Surrey-based Signs has taken on since September. It has printed around 2,000m worth of wall vinyl since its purchase, 200m in the past week.
“We are now manufacturing 80%-90% of what we send out in-house,” he said.
“We tend to do big projects and the problem is that they take up the machine and that means we can’t put other regular stuff through it. Now we can use the new machine for projects and the regular stuff can be made up on the 540.”
Founded in 2000, eight-staff Signs is currently in the process of recruiting, and Andrews wants to have increased the workforce by at least four staff by the end of 2017.
Along with the new Mounter's Mate, it runs various items of finishing equipment alongside the Rolands. Projected turnover is just shy of £750,000, with plans to reach £1m by the end of next year.
