Err

Blog

New Virtuoso Print Manager

New Virtuoso Print Manager
UPGRADE TO VIRTUOSO PRINT MANAGER TODAY!

If you currently use CreativeStudio, please visit the Sawgrass website to learn how to replace CS Print Manager with the Virtuoso Print Manager, so that you can take advantage of the most-up-to-date printing features CreativeStudio has to offer. The update option is available once you have logged in and selected the CreativeStudio option.

This free upgrade of the print manager replaces the PowerDriver and is available for Windows operating systems for all printer sizes (A4, A3 and 25"), there is not currently a MAC option for the 25" VJ628 printer.


Virtuoso Print Manager also now enables VJ 628 users to access and print with CreativeStudio (Windows operating systems only).


OVERVIEW OF VIRTUOSO PRINT MANAGER

Print from CreativeStudio online designer

Though tablets and mobile devices can be used to create designs via CreativeStudio Online Designer, your creations need to print from a computer running Virtuoso Print Manager.

  • Virtuoso Print Manager is a program you install on your computer that enables your Virtuoso printer to receive CreativeStudio files for print.
  • This program has been designed to work specifically with CreativeStudio Online Designer and Virtuoso printers to ensure optimal colour accuracy and print quality.
  • After you set up your Virtuoso printer, just download, install and register Virtuoso Print Manager for access to CreativeStudio Online Designer.
Customisable pre-sets
Any and all print settings - including substrate, paper, hue, contrast, brightness, saturation, mirror and even print quantity - can be customised and saved for future use. If you have a customer who likes stronger reds or more colour saturation - no problem! Simply adjust the print settings to get the colours to your customer’s liking and save them as a custom pre-set for future use.

Advanced colour controls
Easily apply settings optimal for graphic images and colour/ or black-and-white photos. Adjust the hue, contrast, brightness and saturation to meet the needs of even your most selective customers. 

Easy and efficient prints on-demand
Productivity features, such as mirror image and built-in settings for popular substrates and transfer papers, get you up and running quickly. Streamline repeat orders with custom pre-sets and hot folders. With a single click of the mouse, you can quickly send jobs to print and be sure the colours will be right. 

Built-in utilities and resources
To help you keep your Virtuoso system running at its best, Virtuoso Print Manager offers handy, built-in utilities, such as nozzle check and head cleaning commands. When you need additional help, technical, educational and remote resources are just a click away. 

Multilingual User interface with help assist feature
You can configure the Virtuoso Print and Colour Manager user interface to your preferred language: English, Spanish, French, Italian, German or Turkish. The Help Assist feature makes Virtuoso Print Manager even easier to use. Simply place your mouse pointer over a button or menu to see a brief description of functions and how to make a selection.


Created On  11 Apr 2017 12:03  -  Permalink
0 Comments  

Sawgrass helping you grow your business

Sawgrass logoWe have always sold Sawgrass inks for dye sublimation for two reasons - the quality of the inks and the excellent support that Sawgrass offer to their customers for all their products. 

If you are already a Sawgrass user, or if you are thinking of starting in dye sublimation, this is a quick overview of the regular updates and improvements you get when you buy Sawgrass dye sublimation inks from us.


Webinars
Sawgrass regularly run webinars, for example this month they are offering -

Colour Management Solutions - CSPCM
6/8 at 4pm EDT - CSPCM – Creative Studio Print & Colour Manager is a program you install on your computer that enables your Virtuoso printer to receive and manage CreativeStudio files for print. Easily apply settings optimal for graphic images and colour/ or black-and-white photos. Adjust the hue, contrast, brightness and saturation to meet the needs of even your most selective customers. Streamline repeat orders with custom pre-sets and hot folders.

Colour Management Solutions - PowerDriver
6/15 at 4pm EDT - Learn how to use this powerful tool to manage your image colors during production. In addition learn how to use the Colour Wizard function to generate spot colors on demand.

Sublimation Business Startup – What You Need To Know
6/29 at 7pm EDT - Come prepared with your questions so that we can provide you with specific answers to help you make the right buying decisions for your business.

If you want to sign up for any Sawgrass webinars you can do so here - you do not have to be an existing customer to access. Times shown are EDT which is five hours behind the UK.

Creative Studio
Creative Studio is the free online designer included with all Sawgrass Virtuoso printing systems. It is being constantly improved, for example see here for the improvements and additional images/templates added made in April 2016 which included many new templates, images and helpful videos.

What's new from Sawgrass


We do recommend that you take some time to look around all the other resources that are available from you on the Sawgrass web site while you are there.

If you want to talk to us about any aspect of dye sublimation printing do give us a call on 01404 892995 or contact us using our Contact Us page!

Created On  2 Jun 2016 15:56  -  Permalink
0 Comments  

Images on our site

We've always been very happy for all our customers to take images from our site for their own use. 

However some of you have pointed out to us that since our site redesign last year it is no longer possible for you to 'right click + copy' the images when there is more than one image on the page or where the images are zoomable.

To make life easier for you all we will be adding a download link on all affected pages to another page where you can download the large version of the images used on the product page. This will take us some while to do retrospectively so if there are images that you need in the short term then please send us a mail and we will either get that page done for you or will email you the images.

Created On  13 Jan 2016 17:34  -  Permalink
0 Comments  

Santa sacks

New Santa sacks We've done really well with our Christmas stocking for sublimation over the last couple of years but we’ve also been asked for Santa sacks, both polyester for sublimation and cotton for traditional transfers, lasers and vinyl.

We’ve worked with our manufacturer (a UK company we’re delighted to say) and we’ve created three different sacks – white polyester, natural cotton and a lovely "Santa” red cotton – each in two different sizes – a standard 70 x 48 cm size (about like a pillow case) with a single drawstring and the giant ones 70 x 100 cm with double drawstrings.

We expect them all to be available by mid-September in really good time for Christmas and they’ll be at a really competitive price point with the aim that you’ll be able to sell them personalised at very realistic prices (we reckon you’ll be able to make a very decent profit selling the small ones at £10 and the larger at £15 – though frankly I think they could sell for more in the right place).
Created On  26 Sep 2015 16:18  -  Permalink
0 Comments  

It's almost *that* time again ....

I hate to mention the C… word – but it’s the 25th June and we’re halfway between last Christmas and the next one! I’m sure in only a matter of days someone will appear on television telling us we should be getting to work preparing our yule log and making paper chains and checking our on-line address books to see which of our 400 nearest and dearest have changed their address since last year so that they can receive the annual round-robin about little Johnny coming 5th in the under-9 sack race and that funny story about Kylie and her tooth.

But here at TTP towers we are concentrating on more important matters – buying stock to keep our customers happy for Christmas. With a number of our products coming from China – on ships which take six weeks – stock for Christmas has to be on the water by the middle of August – which means it has to be ordered by mid July – and our suppliers are starting to ask (politely) if we have planned our requirements yet.

Our problem is every year we are selling a lot more which of course is great for you and for us – but the real peak of sales is getting later and later. Only a few years ago the first Monday in November was manic Monday – all you guys realised Christmas was coming and orders flooded in and by the 3rd week of November all the big orders had gone and by mid-December all we saw were top-ups of 3 of this and 3 of that "just to make sure I’ve got enough for the last minute customers”. However, last year we were amazed when a customer ordered a pallet of mugs on December 18th and assured us he was going to print and despatch them for Christmas!

We reckon we’re fairly good at predicting our sales – and every year we get better – though there will always be one or two products which surprise us and become the "hot item” of the year. I still have minor nightmares about "the glass coaster shortage of 2012” and "the missing pallet of pencil cases of 2013”!

So the message I’m trying to gently put over is – if you have a product you expect to sell lots of this Christmas it would really help us if you talk to us as early as possible - you never know I might even be able to find a little bit of extra discount. It doesn’t need to be a firm order – and if you want to place a "reservation” on stock to be called off through November and December we are happy to work with you.

Graeme



Created On  25 Jun 2015 16:23  -  Permalink
2 Comments  

A bright new thing!

Regular visitors to our site will soon see that our web site has a new look and feel. So why have we done it?

It's no secret that many more of us are now using mobile devices to surf the web and our old site, while being usable on mobile devices, was beginning to creak a little under the new technology. We know that many of our customers place orders using mobile devices, so the time was right to update our site so that all our visitors, whatever devices they are using, can easily access the site to place orders even when they are on the move.

Like many companies considering a website update we had two ways forward - either upgrading to a responsive site or going the route of a site designed for those using laptops and desktop with a separate version optimised for mobile devices.

Responsive websites are very much in vogue at present. A responsive style website that 'responds' to the visitor and offers up the best version based on the how they are viewing the site sounds a good solution but like many 'one size fits all' solutions it works but does not always look pretty. It often creates pages with a lot of wasted space and uncomfortable formatting because it's hard to design pages that will look equally good on a small iPhone and on a 17", or larger, computer screen.  

BBC News and The Guardian have recently moved to responsive sites albeit the new designs have not exactly been very popular, particularly the BBC redesign which has resulted in disjointed looking pages with large amounts of white space and badly rendered images when viewed on a standard sized screen. We trialled our site in a responsive layout and were not at all impressed with the results.

So we have decided to go the route of designing a new site for those using desktop and laptop computers and offering an optimised version of the site for our mobile visitors to facilitate quick and easy mobile navigation and ordering. The mobile version will not have all the pages that are on the main site but it will have all the products!

Mobile users will be automatically directed to the new version but with the option of easily to the full website with the click of a button if needed.

Our new site will be launched on 10th July and we anticipate that the mobile version will be live early in 2016 once we have completed final testing.



Created On  24 Jun 2015 12:38  -  Permalink
0 Comments