Discussion: Club printer

We are a small club considering investing in a printer. What are people using for printing map these days? Happy to hear all recommendations!

We use an HP Officejet Pro 8610. I'm not positive that model is still being made, but if not, there is probably a similar model. The ink is essentially waterproof, and the quality is decent, at least for maps up to 1:10000. There is an ink plan (Instant Ink I think it's called) that makes printing very economical, something like 5 cents per copy or thereabouts.

When I purchased the printer, it was around $200.

I am leasing a Xerox C60, the current version of the C560 which IOF MC used as their reference CMYK printer: The qualify is excellent (2400x2400DPI, SRA3 (A3+) max size), and the per-sheet costs are really low. The main drawback is that you really need to print a few thousand maps/month. :-(
Second drawback: It is huge and weighs in at 330 kg...

The problem I had, which if you print a lot you may not, is ink jet jets get plugged, if not used often....I finally gave up and got a xerox phaser 6510...it is heavier and larger than an inkjet. The prints seem to be waterproof, and it always works flawlessly....cost was about $280 a few years ago.

Mine is also a small club. My home inkjet printer suits my needs for printing drafts and copies for mapping and checking courses.
For competition maps where we print 120 to +/-300maps per event for a total of about 2400 over the six-month season nothing makes more sense to me than taking the files to Staples and using their do-it-yourself-copying service.
Buying a top of the line printer, like one club I know did, makes no sense to me when much larger and busier businesses are all leasing their printers.

Do your Staples have decent self-serve machines? I walked into an Office Max? Depot? once, and the stupid self serve machine was, to load a file from a stick, about (1) eternity. I gave up and paid 2x as much to sit at the desk and have the kind folks do it.

I've been doing online ordering, but we are a bit squeezed between our customers wanting the last possible minute of registration and the closest location taking a minimum four and sometimes seven hours to print online orders which means I should either tell the customers to deal with an earlier deadline or figure out some way to be less frantic.

Anyway, I have been wondering about putting something in the basement so I could operate on my terms. My personal laser, last I checked, doesn't hold up to map folding as well as the office stores (flaking on creases, fine for scouting/setting, I should re check it), not sure if it's because I use cheaper paper or if my toner isn't great.

Following with interest!

I think Staples has much better printers than we can afford.

Speaking of Staples, I'm very impressed with their quality. Definitely good enough for 1:15000 for important meets. I don't use their self-serve; I go to the printer desk and get someone to do the printing. It's not cheap though, at least not last time I used their services. But it makes more sense than to buy our own printer of that quality. Like igor says -- they have better printers than we can afford.

For regular local meets, like I said above, the HP Officejet Pro 8610 is cheap to purchase and cheap per copy (when using their ink plan), is waterproof, and gives very fine quality up to 1:10000 scale.

I've been using either Staples or FedEx Office for years, placing the order on line. It can take some iterations to get the colors right, so doing a test print a few days in advance is a good idea. It can also be challenging to get them to not shrink the map to fit the page.

A few hours of lead time doesn't sound unreasonable. When I started in this game, getting maps printed (even without courses) was something I had to order six weeks in advance. We've come to expect everything to be instantaneous. It's also not a disaster if you place an order with some extras, and end up with some unused maps.

Registrations over time. Is the last day +40 going to be...one course? Evenly spread? Going to happen at all?



I could still be sad about the time when we were offering day of reg, and the weather went bad, and my "few extra" had three digits. whoops

The Georgia club uses ARC for professional printing services.
We estimate how many maps will be needed. We also have an HP Laserjet printer that can print extra maps in the park on site from a thumb drive.

Of course, in the "old days", this wasn't an issue for local meets, because you had a stack of hundreds of blank maps on hand, and everybody had to copy their course onto a blank. I don't miss those days. (National level meets required registration a few weeks in advance to allow for map printing time.)

I do bring along an inkjet printer when I'm directing a meet in case we run out.

I’m also from a small club.
Some members print from home.
Others including me use Staples. Once I used their print desk staff otherwise I’ve always used the self service printer with my USB memory stick.
Club also has a small portable inkjet printer for onsite map printing.

We use Staples for most of our printing and order online. If you print on Glossy Text paper you get some premium looking maps. Currently, our local store offers same day turnaround if you order before 2:00pm. But I generally try to give them a little more time than that in case they run into any issues.

We use an Epson inkjet printer on site for any last minute printing needs. That's also what I have at home (XP-100). I've used Epson for about 20 years, but will likely change it up next time. I'm really tired of the high ink price and the tendency for it to build ink globs inside. It's high maintenance.

I don't know which "home printer" my club has but I can relate to the registration date/extra maps issue. We had a Veterans O meet earlier this fall where registration had been closed one day earlier than usual (Saturday instead of Sunday). This meant we had to deal with 30-40 more runners than we had maps. Luckily our printer works from home and lives on the map so we sent a "runner" and solved most of the problem together with reusing maps from the early starters.

Anyone else print on Rite-in-Rain paper?

Given our wet winter weather, our switch to printing on Rite-in-Rain (about 10 years ago now), has been a really nice convenience, saving us from stuffing ~3000 maps into plastic bags each winter season.

We buy the paper in bulk direct from the manufacturer and we have reams of the stuff stored at our preferred local print shop.

Our Covid protocols have made it such that only pre-registration is offered, which certainly takes the stress out of knowing how many maps to print.

Another nice thing about professional printing services is that the bill is sent to the club treasurer and the maps are shipped to the meet director.

We've also used pre- registration for two years but opened up for entry-on-the-day for our meet mentioned above.

Around here, we crowdsource the map stuffing to the participants. Each one puts one map in a bag.

The benefits of a dry climate. We average about one event a year that requires map bags. We keep some map bags with our start equipment in case anyone asks for one, but it's pretty rare.

I've started using a local printers. It's $1.08 on Polypropylene (which seems to work). From the comments above this sounds expensive, but I'd have thought the cost would go down if you allowed them to sponsor the map?

@Pink Socks - I have been printing on Rite-in-Rain for the past 4-5 years, primarily for my Spring teaching in schools in MN. I do it with an Epson ink jet. For our club's purposes, MNOC, I had started looking into it in Nov. of 2019, after the end of our 2019 events whether FedEx would laser print on paper supplied by the customer, e.g., Rite-in-Rain, and they said "absolutely". I had a map I was field-checking printed by them onto the paper, and then took them out and "abused" them in mud and swampy areas to see how much better the laser printing holds up - really nicely, I must say. That was in preparation for the 2020 Winter-Spring season starting for us in January.... the rest is covid-history - we never got to try it for the club. Glad to see your report on it!
Added comment to the Polybags: I was telling students that orienteers love and appreciate the outdoors, the environment, being out in nature, being low impact; and then I was handing them maps in polybags.... at some point that no longer felt right. Especially as I could not reuse bags, either.

I printed maps for a canoe-O once using some Epson inkjet with waterproof ink, using Teslin as the paper. Worked quite well. The Teslin is a bit thick and stiff, which might not be that popular for regular orienteering, but in canoe-O there's a lot less handling and folding of the map.

What weigh of the r-in-r paper are you using - 20 or 32#?

I have the 20#, did not even realize that there may be another weight available

Looks like one of the top reviews of the r-in-r paper is from an orienteer :)
https://www.riteintherain.com/printer-paper-20-pou...

And they solved the problem of the third dimension too. IOF MC should take a look instead of those clunky stripes.

I use FedEx to print maps for the Traverse. The local office does them while I wait, usually just the time it takes for the machine to print them....I think the 11x17 I used this year were $0.65 each......I do feel bad about using those plastic bags, I try to reuse mine at local meets, but I still have a pile of them. I bring them to the local supermarket and put them in their plastic grocery bag recycling, I hope they are compatiable.

I reuse map cases for lots of purposes, but they are dwarfed by the packaging of things I get from Amazon or the supermarket.

I think you can minimize when feasible and then not feel guilty.

Orienteer sad about ~single use plastics:



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