Basic Training for our Printing Machines

I believe that training is one of the most fundamental aspect of running a printshop business. Trainings basically provide new learnings, inspire creativity, give fresh insights and trigger inspiration. Today, me and my brother had the benefit of basic hands-on training that Copylandia, the distributor of our printing machines, Risograph MZ-770 and Laser Multifunction Printer Develop Ineo +253, have laid out for us to get up, run and operate our printing machines.

There were two persons from Copylandia that came, one person each for the said machines. First off, we tackled the Risograph. The MZ-770 can print, scan and copy upto A3 size paper and print on one- or two-color spot printing jobs. The MZ-770 has a small touch screen interface alongwith the various buttons on the front panel. We had a black and bright red color ink. The copying functionality went out smoothly. We were able to scan a 2-color document and produce a one-color output. Scanning the document doesn't necessarily provide the expected output. The dark colors on the original document will be printed out black while the lighter colors will be printed out bright red. Printing from the PC provided more consistent results. In order to take advantage of the 2-color output, the proper way of preparing the document, be it in some graphic image editing software, is to put the area in orange that is, if you want this area to be printed out red while the darker areas be put in black, to be printed black. Since this Risograph can print 2-colors in one pass, there are some minor misalingments that can be corrected with the setting of the print area which can be found on the front panel, one for each drum. You can always check first with the "proof" button if the misalignment have been corrected, prior to full scale printing. Each color on the Riso is a set of drum unit and ink. Using different color for the drum unit is not possible. The first drum is usually the black color. Me and my brother took turns trying to familiarize ourselves with the operation while the trainor guided us on how to perform simple checks as well.

Then we proceeded with the hands-on training of the Ineo +253. We first tried how to explore photocopying, one side copies and then back-to-back copies. It has a fairly intuitive touch screen interface which makes it easy to operate. There are three trays on the Ineo +253, one and two for plain paper while bypass tray for thick papers or boards. Printing from the PC is easy. We just need to figure out the orientation of the paper inside the trays to match with the orientation on the PC. That is, if you want to print in landscape mode, one of the trays should have paper put ala landscape. The printing/copying is set by the trainor to print black in default, in order to minimize mistakes like printing a grayscale document using all the inks. Take note that black ink is formed with cyan, magenta and yellow combined, but not necessarily in that order. We were able to print a color document and it is really a treat to see it and hold it. The output is WYSIWYG.

The trainor provided us tips on how to make the most of our machines. Though everything tackled are just basic stuffs, they are still, after all the fundamental ones. Soon after the trainors left, someone entered our print shop and asked us to photocopy their business documents, all 12 pages of them. One of the pages is beyond A4 size and can fit into a long bond paper, but since we don't have yet long bond papers on stock, we reduced the document in order to print it on A4 sheet. We were able to make clear copies and our first customer was more than happy to thank us. What a great way to start. We will be working on more testing to prepare our marketing collaterals in time. Thanks for reading!