How To Get Top Dollar For Your Used Printer (1/2010)

Our life in the world of pre-owned equipment is filled with more than one sad story about the good printer gone bad. Your old printer has served you well, so well in fact that now you have purchased a new one—bigger, faster, better quality, lower-cost ink, the works! You are so happy with your new Baby, you forget about your old one, perhaps your first. You leave it off to the side—unused, unloved, or worse—you unplug it and leave it in a corner. “I’ll sell it one day. My buddy just sold his for $X,000.00!” You have put your faithful companion, the one who made you lots of money—in the corner to die. It is a painful and costly (to you) death.

Your printer has been reliable over the years by being run, and run often. Solvent inks dry quickly—in the printheads, and in the entire ink system. If you have ever replaced a printhead (and likely you have over the years), you know they are extremely expensive. Roland, Mimaki and Mutoh heads by Epson are often over $1000 each and the price is steadily climbing. The more rugged industrial HP heads by Konica-Minolta are around $1600-2000 or more, and this is a 6-head system!

Do the math—your 4-year old $20,000 printer now has a street price of say $8,000. It has 6 heads in it that go for around $1,000 each. A technician would have to come in, replace those 6 heads, clean out the ink lines and pumps (possibly replace them too), replace other parts like dampers, capping station, etc., calibrate the printer, and more. Likely you won’t have to pay someone to haul off the printer—it does have a spare part value after all—but nothing like it would be worth if you had properly prepared it for market.

If you expect to sell it locally within a few weeks, fine. Maintain it as you would normally and send a nozzle check and a small test print daily until the printer is sold.

If a quick sale is not expected or you simply wish to store the unit, here are our suggestions before you take it offline:

1) Print a prime pattern from your printer (the name of this test print changes from brand to brand—Nozzle Check, Test Draw, etc. This is the test that shows if the individual printhead nozzles are firing. Do your very best to have this in tip-top shape. Get a blue light at the hardware store to show the yellow lines. Take some digital photos (with and without the blue light) and be prepared to show them to a prospective buyer. He may not be around the corner so this will be the way to do this.

2) Print a well-known quality test such as the Onyx Quality Test (www.grafxnetwork.com/images/Onyx_Quality_Test.eps). Take a video of it being printed with your digital camera or cell phone (better quality is preferred, of course). Maybe pan around your shop or show some shop ID in the video to authenticate the print. Save and take digital pictures as above, though the blue light should not be necessary here.

3) Only after you have good test prints to show—have a qualified technician fully flush your inks and de-install your printer. Follow the recommendations of the manufacturer. Flush cartridges are not as expensive as ink, often no more than ½ as much as new ones. Generally, it is a good idea to leave the flush cartridges in the printer and leave it plugged in so there is still solvent being pulled through the system.

This may sound strange, but since the printer has already been charged with ink, there may be traces of pigment in the system that can still clog the system. At any rate, it can’t hurt to take this precaution.

Only unplug it and take it completely offline just before it is ready to ship. If it is not possible to store it in this fashion, store the printer in a cool environment to minimize evaporation of solvents in the system.

A sad but true story—the day before this article was written (January 15, 2010), I went on location to look at a Roland SC-540 printer/cutter, a unit that a dealer told me was worth around $10,000 at retail. A real workhorse of a system, it has 6 heads and 12 ink cartridges for long, unattended print runs. A vendor partner said it may need 2 heads but the seller wanted $3500 for it. That was doable, even at $1000 per head. I called the customer to make the appointment and he said it may need 4 heads, which was not as exciting.

When I arrived, there wasn’t one line on the nozzle check that printed, not one! The customer moved the heads away from the capping station, and all 6 were totally dry—no ink was my finger when I rubbed each of the 6 capping stations. Then came the confession.

“Well, we got the new printer in May (8 months ago, another Roland as this one had treated them so well) and we just started using it and didn’t want to manage the two different RIP’s in our workflow. Hey, I just cut this vinyl out this morning, would you like to see me cut something again?”

I shook my head and said “Man, why dealers don’t offer professional de-installation services to help you protect your investment. Did your dealer ask you what you intended to do with the printer and offer any such services?” “No” was his answer. What a shame.

We can offer you a compatible 220 ml solvent ink flush cartridge for around $30 for this printer. The SC-540 needed 12, which is the most that any of these printers would need. Put in an hour of tech time to begin the process, and likely you can do it yourself. So, for around $500 or often less, you can boast and demonstrate to a potential customer how well your machine prints (samples), and how well it was maintained before it was taken offline. Not inexpensive, but consider the alternative when you lack a bargaining position.

That’s how you get top dollar for your used printer.