Connections
Tax Incentives to Buy Printing Equipment like the Wide Format Printer
Did you know you can get a wide format printer, like the Wide Format Legend 72HUV, for $55,000 instead of $85,000? With the 2009 rollover of the Economic Stimulus Act of 2008, it’s possible. Here’s how it works:
According to Section 179 of The Tax Relief… 2010 Act, if a print shop purchases a wide format printer like the Legend 72HUV, they can deduct up to the full purchase amount in the first year – $85,000. In fact, those businesses investing less than $800,000 in qualifying equipment can immediately deduct up to $250,000 (that’s way up from the previous amount of $128,000). Spend over $250,000 that year on equipment and you get an additional 50% deprecation bonus.
That’s big news and the kind of tax incentive that equals real, tangible savings. Based on an average print shop tax rate of about 30%, that $85,000 deduction on a wide format printer works out to a total, real dollar tax savings of $30,000. And guess what? That brings your financing price down to $55,000.
You can use our free Do the Math tax calculator spreadsheet to figure out exactly how much you’ll be able to deduct on your taxes and what you’ll save, in real dollars, on a wide format printer purchase. Click here to use the official online calculator from www.section179.org.
These types of generous government tax incentives don’t stay around forever, they usually dry up and disappear as the economy improves, the budget changes or the government moves in a new direction. So, if you’ve been thinking about going wide or investing in a new piece of equipment, now is the time to do it.
Visit lloydsofindiana.com Today to search for your one-stop-shop printing needs.
Low-Cost Posters for Theatre Troupes
Here in Indianapolis, we have a vibrant, thriving independent theatre community (so vibrant, in fact, that I spelled “theatre” the fancy way, with “re” at the end).
Each summer is the Indy Fringe Festival, an independent theatre festival, held just a couple miles from our office is Massachusetts Avenue. Mass Ave, as it’s known to the locals, has a cluster of independent theaters, and for 10 days, it’s overrun with theatre goers, buskers, and the actors themselves who visit each others’ shows and hang out at the bars and restaurants along 5-block district northeast of downtown Indy.
So what do theatre troupes have to do with a printing blog? A lot, actually.
As I travel up and down Mass Ave, there’s one theater — Theater on the Square — which has some of the best posters promoting their plays I’ve seen in town.
Sadly, I can’t walk anywhere without casting my printer’s eye on any printed material, so I’m always impressed by these posters. They’re bright, they’re colorful, they’re well-designed.
And they’re huge.
I would love to see more theaters (and theatres) use poster printing technology like TOTS uses. Most people have the mistaken belief that posters are expensive, or that you need to order thousands of posters to get a decent price break.
Not at all. Thanks to wide-format printing technology, like the Legend 72HUV UV curable ink jet printer. We have one of these in our shop, and I’m continually impressed by what it can do.
First, it prints to nearly any surface or substrate — we once printed to a full-size door, another time we printed to a 3′ x 6′ piece of 1/2″ plywood. Second, it’s like a giant inkjet printer (okay, it is a giant inkjet printer), which means it does full-color printing, including photos and funky poster designs. Third, it’s UV ink, which means it’s environmentally friendly and non-toxic. And fourth, you can print out short runs of full-color pages for a fraction of the cost of a traditional offset printer.
So what does that mean to theatre troupes?
Imagine printing giant posters promoting your play on vinyl, Gator board, or even a door. Imagine printing rehearsal photos, cast photos, and all kinds of great colors and backgrounds for your posters. Imagine printing only a few hundred full-color flyers on glossy paper, not several thousand.
Even if you’re not a theatre troupe in Central Indiana, there are still ways to find this technology in your area. Contact us at (877) 626-6848, and we’ll be happy to locate a Legend 72HUV sign shop in your area.
Photo: Kevin Burkett
How Visual Artists Can Promote and Sell Their Work With Ultraviolet Printing
We have a thriving arts community here in Indianapolis. Visual artists, dancers, writers, actors, musicians all comprise one of the best arts communities here in the Midwest. We have a monthly arts/gallery walk on the first Friday of every month called — what else? — First Friday. And everywhere you walk there are flyers, printed posters, and postcards inviting us to attend their next gallery showing.
Artists are an ideal user for the Legend 72HUV wide format printer. This ultraviolet ink printer is capable of producing eye-popping graphics, filled with vivid colors and sharp detail. Any artist who is currently making color photocopies at their local copy shop or printing flyers on their desktop computer at home is doing themselves a disservice.
Here are a few ways you can promote your art with ultraviolet printing technology.
- Prints: For you digital artists and photographers, rather than paying for high-cost prints on traditional paper, consider using an unusual medium like plywood or even foam core board. We have used our printer to print signs on plywood, gator board, vinyl, and even a door. So, sure we can do high-gloss paper, but make your art really stand out by printing on something no one else has.
- Posters: This is especially crucial for you visual artists who show some of your work in your promotional posters. Create special posters for your upcoming exhibits, or commemorative posters for family and friends. Gallery owners, take note. This is something for you to consider too.
- Flyers: The nice thing about a wide-format printer is that you can run several 8.5 x 11 flyers on one big sheet. This can bring down the per piece cost for running full-color flyers, especially if you’re printing to high-gloss paper or if you need to print to both sides.
- Prints for Sale: This is especially important for painters. Now you can sell prints of your work for $50 – $75 apiece, while your original paintings are going for a few hundred or even a few thousand dollars. This helps promote your art, creates additional fans, and gets your art into the hands of more people.
- Postcards: Hopefully you’ve been collecting a mailing list of people who visit your exhibitions. If so, send postcards inviting people to your upcoming exhibits with a variable data postcard — not only do you put their name and address on the postcard, but you can even add a personalized message to your favorite patrons.
Thanks to the latest developments in printing technology, there’s no reason artists shouldn’t use this as a way to promote and produce their art. If you would like more information, you can call us at (877) 626-6848, or find us at LloydsOfIndiana.com.
How a Wide Format Printer Can Increase Print Shop Profitability
As a distributor and fan of wide format printers like the Legend 72HUV UV curable printer/a>, I can’t help but be excited about all the different things this printer can do.
For one thing, it can make a print shop more profitable. Not just because it’s a new piece of equipment with some great benefits and cool features, like printing with ultraviolet curable ink, or specialty sign printing.
We’re actually seeing a lot of cut sheet/sheet-fed printers switch to wide format printing, because they can offer their customers so much more.
For one thing, you can run small signs on the Legend 72HUV. Rather than turning away large print formats, you can now accept poster print jobs for theaters and bands, signs for special events, and even specialty projects like 11×17 brochures.
We have a customer in Ohio who said that as a sheet-fed printer, he has to run $10,000 of sheet fed paper just to make $1,000 in profit. That’s because his margins are already so low, and he’s losing a lot of profit in labor and production costs.
But if he were to switch over to a wide format printer, he would only need to do $2,000 in printing to make $1,000 profit.
Because the wide format printer is so new, and is very inexpensive compared to other printing equipment, if you can add a 20% – 30% margin, you can pay for the machine in a year. (And 40% margins are not unheard of with this printer either.)
If you’re interested in more information on the Legend 72HUV wide format printer, visit us at WideFormatRevolution.com, or call us at (877) 626-6848.