The past week has been a printing frenzy. Moments ago I finished printing the last one for my first shipment to Hoffman. WHEW! Next week I'm going to start printing a few copies of everything to keep on hand and ready to ship so that it's not a rush like this every time I get an order!
Since I love to review things, I thought I would give a little bit of a review on the new printer.
Overall, I give it a rating of awesome. There are a few minor little things that are kind of irksome, but nothing that makes me regret my choice in any way. It's louder than my little inkjet, but it's not bothersome since I'm generally at the computer working while I'm printing anyway rather than trying to watch television or something. It gets paper jams a bit. I'm hoping to remedy that with a change in paper, next time I order I'm going to try the Xerox 28lb paper instead of the Staples brand. Staples brand just went up in price so the price of the two is comparable anyway.
After a few hundred pages of printing, it does slow down dramatically as it cools off. Again, not a major deal. What I do is print a batch then check them all over and then start the next batch while I bag. So I've already found a workable solution.
As far as ink usage, the printer is phenomenal. The ink costs $99 for each cyan, magenta and yellow, and $290 for black (of course because you use more black, right?), and each pack comes with six cubes. So each cube of colour costs $16.50, and each cube of black costs about $50. So far, for 6000 pages, I've used 1 cube of each colour and 2 cubes of black, printing the colour covers on high quality and the charts/instructions on normal quality. About half of them have colour in the chart for the specialty stitches. The manufacturer suggests you'll get about 2500-3000 pages per cube, and that is exactly what I AM getting, unlike other printers where you get less than half of the suggested yield. Very impressive. It also requires a maintenance kit, either every 10000 pages for $70 or every 30000 pages for $110. All in all it's costing an average of 3 cents per page (not including paper). So while the printer is fairly expensive, it will pay itself off rather quickly in savings on ink. A note to designers or anyone who does a lot of printing - the Xerox ColorQube 8870 is a great investment.
On to the subject of model stitchers, I wanted to say thank you to everyone who offered and that for the time being, the positions have been filled. :) I must admit, being the control freak that I am, it is difficult to relinquish control but I'm very happy to have found some wonderful stitchers and hope to keep you guys busy. :)
On to designs and stitching... well I've got a new series in the works. It's a four part series called A Sampling of Seasons, with each season being it's own design, which can be stitched individually or together as one big sampler. I'll be starting the stitching myself soon and again, because I'm so darn indecisive, I've decided to include two colourways for it, one classic and elegant and one fun and bright. It's a more complex series of pieces, with lots of specialty stitches. The floss for these came yesterday and my goodness the colours are pretty! Valdani does some really wonderful colours, truly.
Congratulations on the weight loss!! It is difficult but hang in there.
ReplyDeleteJust so you know - the paper you run in a Xerox printer (and I imagine any other printer) makes a HUGE difference. I could give you all sorts of info on what to do to make your printing less of a hassle, as could any good Xerox service rep. Always use Xerox paper (or another high quality paper). There is less waste overall and the results are much nicer. Couple that with far fewer jams and you will be a happy camper. Also, check to see if the "curl" of the paper should be loaded into the machine up or down, that cuts down on jams as well.
ReplyDeleteI am glad to see you are going with heavier paper as the designers that use 20 lb paper AND double-side do their customers a huge disservice. I have no issue with double-siding as long as the paper is heavy enough to keep the reverse side image from showing through to the other side. It can make it hard to "read" the chart.
Great news on the weight loss! I keep thinking when my "baking" daughter moves out, I might lose weight as well! :-) Of course that might just be a fanciful dream on my part!