Paratore Signs Triples Throughput with New EFI VUTEk UV Inkjet Printer

EFI has announced that Paratore Signs has become one of the country’s first businesses to install the new, hybrid roll/flatbed EFI VUTEk H2000 Pro printer with UltraDrop Technology. The Syracuse, N.Y.-based company purchased the printer to augment its digital production of signs and display graphics.

The installation – which also included the new version 6 of EFI Fiery XF Production software – adds significant throughput capacity, building on the digital printing success Paratore Signs has had with an older EFI VUTEk PressVu printer. “We are pleased to continue our relationship with EFI,” said John Paratore, the company’s president. “Our older flatbed printer delivered four 4×8-foot boards per hour and now we are producing 14. That’s a huge step forward for our business.

“Not only are we more than tripling our throughput with the new VUTEk printer,” Paratore added, “we are also able to deliver significantly improved quality with its 1,000-dpi resolution and 7-picoliter UltraDrop Technology. The printer has already enabled us to secure new retail and trade customers and we see more growth in our future.”

Paratore Signs’ new VUTEk printer is a 2-meter wide, six-color, UV inkjet device featuring EFI’s UltraDrop variable-droplet grayscale technology. Its production-level speeds and high-end imaging make it ideal for a wide variety of mid-volume sign and display graphics work. While the printer’s 1,000-dots per inch (dpi) imaging capability produces what John Paratore describes as “stunning quality,” he said even the printer’s 600-dpi setting outperforms what the company was able to output in the past, with faster throughput and less ink consumption.

John Paratore chose to fully load his new VUTEk printer with white ink and roll-to-roll media handling. And, he moved to maximize the quality and efficiency of his wide-format imaging workflow by adding EFI Fiery XF software to drive the new printer.

Paratore Signs’ Fiery XF software includes optional support for digital cutters and new tiling features – tools that EFI says have helped the company reduce wasted media while printing more jobs per shift. Using this new technology to add vision marks to prints in the job-prep process “makes it easy and productive for us to gang posters and other smaller items in a single job for automated processing with our digital cutting table,” according to John Paratore.

Paratore added that the white ink option he purchased with his new printer “opens the door to higher-end production on transparent and dark substrates that we were unable to achieve before. And the one-pass, three-layer capability with white ink creates signs with unbelievable quality whether they are viewed in daylight or backlit.”

“It is exciting to see multi-generation, family-owned companies like Paratore Signs aggressively staying ahead of market trends,” said Frank Mallozzi, EFI’s senior vice president of worldwide sales and marketing. “Paratore Signs’ new printer provides more flexibility in high-end inkjet printing with a lower total cost of ownership. We look forward to continuing our longstanding partnership with John Paratore and his team as they continue to grow their business.”