Their goal is to establish long lasting relationships with their
clients based on trust, a shared success and a commitment to quality. Their
vision is to have every customer recommend CompuSystems. To succeed,
CompuSystems is dedicated to making investments in quality products and
services to support their customers now and in the future.
When Jeremy Kubik, Director of IT for CompuSystems, and I first
communicated, he was looking for an alternative to the Xerox Color printers
they were using. Jeremy said, “We’re
looking for an alternative to the Xerox sheet fed printer. We want to use some type of continuous badges;
many of our badges are 4” x 12”. In
addition, we need a smaller footprint as our registration desks have limited
space. Plus we need to have the
capability to print on-demand and in color.”
Based on our discussion, I sent samples of both 10 mil paper and 8 mil
poly badges designed to work in the C3500.
The poly material is more expensive than the paper; but prints great and
is very durable. Ink costs are less,
generally, compared to laser.. On the
sample artwork provided by Jeremy, I estimated the ink cost for the C3500
printer at $0.049/badge. Not bad for a
12” tag.
 |
| 4" x 12" Badge Ink Cost-C3500 |
As CompuSystems consider alternatives, I found a new 8 pt tag paper tag
material that was stiffer and printed great.
Plus this material was very affordable.
With this new material, Jeremy created a new 12” tag design, set up to
print 2, 4” x 6” badges separated by a crease.
With this design, the C3500 can print a two-sided badge.
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| 4" x 12" Badge Design |
Based on the available materials, running costs and printer cost,
CompuSystems purchased C3500 printers for their badge printing.
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| C3500 Badge Printers |
Even more interesting to me, is how CompuSystems deployed the printers
in an overall solution. First, how the
printers were deployed. According to
Jeremy, “to install and configure the printer drivers, I figured out how to accomplish
this task via a batch mode. This step
was important as every badge pickup desk at each event uses a different
server. The batch driver deployment
makes it easy for us to set up an event.”
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| C3500 Badge Printers |
In addition, CompuSystems uses BarTender to create the templates and
print badges. According to Jeremy, “we
use BarTender to print our badges. Our Unix-based
registration application looks up each person in the database and “prints” via
port 9100 to the local BarTender server.
BarTender then adds the variable information to the template to create
each individual badge. We’re printing
hundreds or even thousands of badges at a time with variable information. All
that information is then synchronized with our main servers. BarTender works great for us.”
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| BarTender Badge Printing |
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| C3500 Badge |
Jeremy and CompuSystems has built a great solution for printing color
badges on demand using the C3500 printers and BarTender. Jeremy says “we’re very happy with the
performance of the C3500 in our first event.
They’re working great; printing very fast. We especially like the short time to first
print. Plus the print quality is
sufficient for our situation.”
In addition, we’ve found badge material, both paper and poly that print
great and is affordable.
 |
| Fanfold Badge Tags |
If you need to print event badges, contact us. We’ll help you move to printing color badges on-demand,
saving you time and money.
Guy Mikel
855-962-7670
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