There are many types of high-end printers out there, but even if they were built for different purposes, they all share some common traits that sign and digital graphics shops should keep in mind when shopping around.
High-end machines should be fast but still offer high-quality prints. They should be well made out of materials that aren’t going to break down after a couple of print runs and should use ink efficiently, depending on the print substrate.
High-End Wraps
OKI Data Corp. -- which purchased Seiko’s wide-format printer business on October, 2015, manufactures high-quality wraps printers, including the ColorPainter M-64s and its newest product, the ColorPainter H3-104s -- says that its printers are very versatile, working with many different media as well as wrap films.
“A lot has to do with the speed and the quality you get at that speed,” says Kelly Gornick, marketing and communications manager, wide format division, for OKI Data in Escondido, Calif. “Looking at the return on investment, it is a huge benefit to companies that have bottlenecks in productivity. It can give you good quality and speed.”
OKI Data says the ColorPainter is very sturdy. It has a metal frame and parts that will last rather than being made out of plastic with only a two or three-year lifecycle. The company also touts its ink efficiency because the cost of ink is something many buyers overlook when choosing a high-end printer.
“Ink cost and the savings that equates from that can be hard for people to understand because there are so many variables, including the type of media running, the speeds and the type of print they are creating,” Gornick says.
Having an ink-efficient printer translates into a lower cost per square foot. Gornick says companies that use the ColorPainter constantly can save money in ink costs.
“Those cost savings will help justify part of their return on investment on the equipment,” she adds.
For the ColorPainter M-64s, the cost is around 18 cents per square foot to run. OKI sells proprietary ink.
“Our ink has high viscosity. It contains more pigment and helps reduce ink usage and running costs [for] higher density graphics,” Gornick says.
Another thing shop owners should look for is the durability of the printhead.
Gornick says the ColorPainter printers use a very rugged, industrial printhead that is geared for high speed, high viscosity ink and a shorter print time.
Machines like this can increase profitability per hour because they can print more pieces in less time. This makes them very desirable for smaller print shops that want to compete with larger print shops or online entities, she adds.
Durst US manufactures high-end fabric printers as well as UV-cure printers. Many of the company’s customers are in the soft signage business, says Bob Rychel, sales manager for textiles for Durst US and Canada.
Sign shops looking to purchase a high-end fabric printer need to choose the appropriate inks for the textile types they plan to print on and they need to know how much throughput they need their machine to handle and the width of the products that can be printed on it, he says.
If a shop primarily wants to print fabric for trade show booths, it would make sense for them to purchase a machine that is at least 10 feet wide because trade show booths are typically 10 feet wide.
Once they decide on the size of machine they want, print shops need to look at what each manufacturer brings to the table in regard to engineering, service or support, Rychel says.
The textile printing market is moving rapidly to direct-to-print options. Because of that, textile manufacturers are moving toward selling only coated textiles that can be used in all types of printing solutions, including direct-to-print and transfer printing.
One of the big detractors to direct textile printing in the past was color quality, but advances in the market have made the vibrancy and color of the direct print closer to the result of transfer printing than it was before.
“We’re so close now to having equal color impact on direct print with all of the implications of not having to deal with paper. It kind of tips the balance more than ever toward direct print,” Rychel says.
The other benefit to choosing a more production-oriented printer is that it is quick enough and the print quality is good enough to make older printers obsolete. He says that many smaller print shops have multiple versions of the same type of printer and each one prints a little differently, so managing print quality and color for a specific job across multiple printers can be difficult.
“The financial edge, in terms of the cost of consumables, will go to direct print when you eliminate transfer paper from the equation. It also eliminates transferring headaches, like paper and fabric moving through a rotary calendar press versus a single piece of fabric,” he says.
When paper and fabric are involved, it increases the number of potential mistakes, like ghosting, where you get a shadowy effect when the paper’s not moving through the press the same way the polyester is. Those types of problems increase the waste of product, time and money.
Durst manufactures the Rhotex 322, a non-belted 10-foot solution for direct printing of textiles. The Rhotex can print unattended and can handle stretchy materials, Rychel says. The Rhotex includes a counterbalancing weight system that allows it to handle stretch fabrics.
As the fabric moves under the printheads and ink is jetted onto the fabric.
“We want it in a natural state, not stretched. It needs tension but no stretch. The weight allows us to jet ink in the print zone without stretching it. As soon as we do a pass, we move the material quickly and then back to its natural state,” Rychel says. “We change that weight system depending on the stretch of the fabric.”
The company’s Rhotex HS printer is a belted machine that can print on any type of stretchy material, including very thin chiffon polyesters and non-dimensionally stable fabrics. The machine uses an adhesive on the belt that moves the fabric through the print zone without stretching it. It can print between 3,200 and 4,500 square feet per hour.
Costs increase depending on the size of the fabric rolls a company wants to print. Some machines can handle 15-inch diameter rolls and others can handle 1-meter or larger rolls.
Some important things to keep in mind when looking for a high-end textile printer: the durability of the head technology and whether the inks were developed specifically to be optimized to run with the printer’s width and firmware. Another thing to keep in mind is who is providing customer support.
High-End Eco-Sol Prints
Richard Finkel, international sales manager at SID Signs USA in Doral, Florida, agrees that print and ink quality is important when choosing a high-end printer. The quality of the printhead is also important, especially when it comes to print speed.
SID Signs manufactures its TRITON series of eco-solvent printers in a variety of sizes ranging from 63 inches to 126 inches. They all use Epson DX5 printheads, which allow the machines to print high-resolution prints up to 1440 dots per inch.
“One of the advantages of the SID TRITON printer is we also can print on rigid materials with the eco-solvent ink, like paper, foam board and polystyrene, and we offer optional tables for printing on rigid materials,” Finkel says.
The TRITON printers all have bulk four-color ink systems built in, which use less ink than when printing with six or more colors.
The company’s SID MERCURY Series prints from 720 dpi to 1440 dpi and can handle up to six inks at a time. It prints on banner, mesh, vinyl, perforated vinyl, paper, polyester fabric and canvas. The MERCURY printers can use solvent or light solvent inks, which are less expensive than eco-solvent inks.
Many of SID Signs’ customers print large outdoor signage, so the wider machines give a print shop more flexibility in the size of graphics being printed. The 126-inch printer comes with the capacity to allow a shop to load two 63-inch or 54-inch rolls at a time to double the machine’s output.
When choosing a high-end printer, Finkel recommends determining who your customers are first, what sort of durability and print resolution they need and how fast they need to turn around prints.
“It is generally good to estimate the production the customers need. If customers need more production, we offer other models that have higher productivity using other printheads,” he says.