Purchasing printing presses can be a much better option than investing in a brand new machine. Most printers that are sold on websites dedicated to the trade of this sort of items, such as Allforprintmarket.com, are usually in pretty good condition and have not necessarily been used for a long time. You can cut down the expenses and have a fine working machine as long as you pay attention to some details.
First of all, try to find out as much as you can about the previous owner. You are probably asking yourself why they are selling a perfectly good piece of printing equipment. Well, you should ask them as well. Most companies offer their used printing presses for sale because they want more recently released ones or because they have to reduce the number of assets in order to regain financial balance.
However, in other cases, such assets are sold because the company went bankrupt. If this is the case, you need to make all the inquiries in order to be certain that the transaction is completely legal: you don’t want to end up with a machine that actually belongs to a lien holder.
A very important detail you should not overlook is whether the machine is sold together with its manual. If you take a look on all the forums dedicated to this subject, you will see that the most common complaint made by people who have invested in used printing equipment is that do not have the manual and, having encountered difficulties with assembling, maintaining or using the machine, they need it.
As strange as it may seem, many manuals are not very easy to come across. Moreover, you probably don’t want to pay extra for this. So, it is best if you avoided purchasing used printing presses if the owner does not have the manual anymore.
An aspect, which you should take into account when buying printing equipment, new or second-hand, is why you want a certain model. It is not practical to invest in something that has numerous features, which you are not actually going to use.
This can be very tempting when it comes to purchasing used printing presses because you might come across items that are very expensive on the market and that are sold at extremely convenient prices. But keep this in mind: buy something that meets your expectances and requirements instead of a highly performant machine that has multiple features in which you are not interested.
Of course, the most important aspect is to make sure that the printer is functional and will not cause trouble. You can confidently ask the seller to let you see the machine working.
Pay attention to the printing quality, colors, smudges, but also to unexpected noises the printer might make. If you can hear anything unusual, it might mean that there are parts, which could get broken any time, so either ask the owner if they can fix the problem before selling, either continue to look for another machine.
Besides that, make inquiries about the equipments’ maintenance and repair history – if numerous repairs and replacements were required, you will probably want to avoid buying the machine. All in all, however, there are great chances that you will find exactly what you need on the used printing presses market.