With the apparent
decline in the volume of A/E/C wide-format printing, one wonders who’s buying
wide-format systems and, for those who have been buying wide-format print
systems, what brands and models they’ve been buying. I sure wish the APDSP would conduct a survey
on that issue and publish the results.
On the high to medium volume (output speed) range, OCE, Xerox, KIP and
HP offer systems …. and the Vortex 4200 system is still on the market …. and
The Heavey Group offers ROWE wide-format systems. That’s a lot of brands to choose from, and if
the A/E/C print business continues declining, one wonders how all of these
brands will survive. I guess the
question is, who will be the next wide-format system manufacturer to go down
for the count?
As reported in
July on the IRgA (now APDSP) web-site, RTI, then the North American dealer for
the Vortex 4200 wide-format system, shuttered its business:
Reprographic Technologies Inc.,
better known in the industry as RTI, shut its doors in June after about 25
years in business. What happened?
“The bottom line is we got extended
beyond what we were capable of managing, and at that stage elected to exit the
business completely,” says Erik Norman, the company’s vice president of sales
and marketing.
“We gave it a good go,” says Kevin
Howes, who was RTI’s director of print solutions and is now poised to become
executive director of RSA (read more about that here). “We were like
the little engine that could.” In the end, though, the “little engine” just
couldn’t climb that long hill.
(Note: Kevin Howes recently became the Executive
Director of Reprographic Services Corporation RSA))
Link
to the complete story that was authored by Ed Avis and posted on the IRgA
web-site (now the APDSP web-site):
Rigoli, an Italian
company, continues to produce the Vortex 4200.
What Rigoli said:
Rigoli will continue making the machine, that company has confirmed in
an email: “My name is Zsolt Tarjanyi and I was the leader of the development of
the Vortex 4200 and Vortex 4204 products. I can confirm that Rigoli S.R.L.
carries on with the production and support of these units.”
Kevin Shimamoto, general manager of Memjet Wide Format, based in San
Diego, California, confirmed the relationship with Rigoli.
“We recently discontinued our OEM agreement with RTI and now have a new
OEM partner taking over their business, Rigoli, who is the manufacturer of the
Vortex,” Shimamoto wrote in an email. “They have partnered with the Drafting
Clinic Canada to support North America under the Rigoli OEM brand. All RTI
resellers should have already been contacted. Rigoli will support all current
RTI resellers and end users worldwide with consumables and printer service and
support.”
Link to Rigolis’
web-site:
Mentioned
above, The Drafting Clinic Canada, is, apparently, the Vortex 4200 dealer for
North America. (Kind of wonder how they
are doing with sales in the U.S.) The
Drafting Clinic Canada, based in the Toronto metro area, apparently offers
several different brands of wide-format plotter/printer/MFP systems, including
Canon imagePrograf, KIP, Teriostar and MAX (the latter brand is new to me.) Apparently,
they are not dealers for HP plotter/printers/MFP’s, DesignJet or PageWide. Kind of wondering why that is!
Link to The Drafting Clinic Canada’s
web-site:
At the time RTI went down for the count, an
auction was held to dispose of RTI’s assets.
On June 29th
and 30th (2016), Heritage Global Partners, an auction company,
conducted an on-line auction to sell off Reprographic Technologies’
assets. Here’s a link to the stuff that
was auctioned off. Apparently, 6 or 7
Vortex 4200 wide-format printing systems were included in that auction. I wonder who bought those; they must have
gotten spectacular (really cheap) deals. (Just a guess, but I would think that
The Drafting Clinic Canada bought those systems.)
Link to auctioned items:
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