Can You Copy Our Capabilities?
CopyLab Pte Ltd is a well-rehearsed system of incoming requests and outgoing prints. As a digitalised printing company, CopyLab has automated many processes and solved many different industries’ print requests and needs.
They work with Canon’s black and white printers such as the Canon varioPRINT 110 and 115, and print important documents for customers spanning across the business, legal, architectural, and education fields. They also utilise large format printers such as the Canon imagePROGRAF iPF8410SE and Canon PlotWave 350.
We sat down with Mr Alson Pek, who co-founded CopyLab 16 years ago, to share with us what goes on behind the flurry of printing activity and how the printers keep CopyLab running non-stop in this industry.
You have a high volume of job requests to fulfill every day, from printing banners to creating digital prints. What is your day-to-day schedule like?
We rush out a lot of print work and have to operate between many different printers. As such, we depend highly on our varioPRINT 110 and 115 (Canon’s black and white printers), as well as Canon’s large format printer, the imagePROGRAF iPF8410SE.
We offer some graphic design services, hence there are a lot of different formats to print. Besides our weekly usual order of printed private institutions’ course notes and office documents, we also attend to ad-hoc requests for banners, large posters and even 3D acrylic signs. We use specific machines to achieve our various printing needs, like printing for construction and shipping companies with the Canon PlotWave 350 for vessel drawings and AutoCAD drawings. Our Canon printer is able to carry out the task reliably and gives us very few issues.
To help our customers meet their printing demands, we receive walk-in requests. We receive a lot of email enquiries too. In fact, email print job requests are easier for us as we can immediately send to the printers or schedule for printing, and they can come down to collect or we can deliver it to them right after.
How does Canon and our printers support your business needs?
Canon printers are one of the best in business. With innovative imaging technology and rock-solid engineering, the varioPRINT 115 is a reliable, environmentally-friendly and easy-to-use workhorse, built for business. Canon varioPRINT 110 is also a capable printer that rewrites the rulebook for image consistency, ease of operation, system configurability and performance uptime.
Well, with upgrades and more advanced software features such as pagination for print media or booklet printing, we no longer have to sort our prints page by page manually. With this automated process, our staff is freed up to work on more important matters like the finishings. This helps us a lot with our productivity.
It helps tremendously when the printers can sync among themselves. Let’s say, if we have a print job that requires us to print a 100 sets of documents, we simply send the request to one of our Canon black and white printers for simultaneous printing. Though both the black and white printers are of different models, they are able to work together well when we send over a print job. If printer A is available, it starts printing, and B and C pick up from what A has completed after each finishing their printing jobs. The printing queue is divided amongst them and they are able to automatically tally the amount of print work left.
How is the printing industry like now and how is CopyLab affected?
In the fourth quarter of 2020, output in the printing segment fell by 12 per cent according to the Ministry of Trade and Industry Economic Survey of Singapore.
Of course – this industry is very competitive. The daily challenge is combating the shrinking demand of volume. The pandemic has impacted us in terms of printing volume, like getting less demand for vessel drawings and name cards. But I do believe that there will be a pick-up, depending on how you capture the market.
Amongst the many brands available, why did you choose Canon?
Canon’s printer line-up includes several well-known series like the imagePROGRAF series and the Canon brand. The Canon PlotWave 350 is built on the award-winning success of the Canon PlotWave 300 large format printer and brings the next wave in versatility, speed and reliability for printing, copying and scanning technical documents.
Price is one factor. In fact, we did a survey on black and white printers, and found Canon’s very capable in this regard for the quality of printing – especially for Canon as it is very robust, with a fantastic greyscale. Other brands, in contrast, can only print out solid black and cannot tone down to grayscale unlike the Canon PlotWave 350.
In this industry, we value speed and reliability a lot since every minute counts in the printing business. I really like that Canon’s varioPRINT 110 and 115 can run for six to eight hours without stopping and are very hardy, very difficult to break down, which is why we have been with them for many years. Thank you Canon!
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