OKI the perfect match for Clearview Estate Winery

When iconic and busy Hawke’s Bay winery and restaurant Clearview Estate sought a printer to support its wine tastings and produce professional ‘table talkers’ and other materials, it’s requirements were clear: reliability, low cost per page, and great quality colour output. Meeting this need is the OKI C610dn colour LED printer.

Established in 1989, Clearview Estate Winery in the Hawke’s Bay is located near the historic landscape of Cape Kidnappers. The restaurant offers a comprehensive seasonal menu, complemented by the Estate’s famed and multi-gold medal-winning Clearview Reserve Chardonnay and full bodied red wines.

The trophy cabinet at Clearview Estate is well-populated, containing over 40 awards for its wines, which are available throughout New Zealand and internationally in export markets including Australia, USA, Canada, Brazil, China, Japan, Korea, Singapore and Europe.

The estate also grows avocados, olives and citrus trees and culinary herbs to supply the kitchen. The restaurant and Clearview’s historic accommodation  provide a unique  venue  for weddings, functions and special occasion celebrations.

Situation:
As a busy venue at which wine tastings are a guest highlight, Clearview Estate Trade Sales Leigh Cowan says its requirements from a colour printer were quite specific: “We wanted a machine which could be located in the wine tasting room to produce tasting notes as guest handouts.”

In addition, he says the printer is used for on-site promotional material, producing updated menus and ‘table talkers’, black and white invoice printing, for directional signage.

Being in a public area, the demands on the machine are a little out of the ordinary. As a venue which puts professionalism and guest service first, reliability and the quality of output is paramount. “The printer plays a role in delivering our guest experience as the tasting notes are printed and handed out on the spot,” says Cowan.

Paper jams or any other interruptions would be unseemly and potentially embarrassing.  Instead, Clearview Estate wanted a machine which would simply deliver with no fuss or hassle, allowing the sommelier to focus on guests – and, of course, the wine.

Solution:
Instead of selecting an inkjet machine and having to deal with high-cost and low-yield cartridges, Clearview Estate chose the networked, duplex-capable OKI C610dn. Suitable for workgroups of up to 12 people, the machine employs OKI’s ‘Single Pass’ colour LED technology to deliver a highly reliable print process, with colour resolution of 1200x600 DPI.

Single Pass means paper travels through the machine just once as the image is created, with minimal bending. That’s a key factor in avoiding the paper jams for which many other printers have a reputation. “The OKI C610dn simply does what we need it to do. It is easy to use and is always ready to handle any jobs we have for it,” confirms Cowan.

Those jobs include printing ‘table talkers’, promotional flyers produced on higher-weight paper and placed in holders on tables. The OKI C610dn’s ability to handle anything up to 250gsm card stock is invaluable for this purpose.

Other features of the machine to which Cowan calls attention include the large capacity toner cartridges; standard cartridges deliver 6,000 pages of CMYK colour and 8,000 pages in mono (black). That means more time and prints between maintenance; with the Estate producing some 500 pages per month, more in busy times, it’s C610dn hasn’t required any attention since installation.

As a compact device which reliably meets Clearview Estate’s needs, the OKI C610dn’s small stature (‘We like the fact that it isn’t very large,’ says Cowan) belies its capabilities. With a maximum duty cycle of up to 75,000 pages per month (but an average of 1,500-5,000 pages per month) it is also fast, printing up to 32 pages per minute in colour and 36 in mono. Taking just 9 seconds for colour and 8 seconds for mono means no time is wasted in getting urgent jobs out.

However, says Cowan, speed isn’t considered a major priority for Clearview Estate’s printing needs. Instead, he says it is the reliability and ease of use which really make the difference. “The OKI is great to work with. It is company, easy to install on a network, and easy for all our staff to work with.”

Most importantly, the C610dn produces prints of a quality which perfectly accompany the guest experience and wines for which Clearview Estate is renowned.