Which Printer for Sublimation?
Before you reply telling me to search threads etc, hear me out.
When we started doing sublimation (10 years ago) we started out with an Epson workforce printer, refillable cartridges from eBay and Chinese ink that ‘just worked’ without a profile. We were new to the game and we were only doing a handful of mugs per week so all was good.
We quickly progressed to printing a few boxes of mugs per week, then a couple thousand a month, and bought various Epson Ecotanks, had Sublinova inks and had profiles made for our specific set up and all was great….until it wasn’t.
We wanted to move to printing on mug sized paper (238x98mm) and every Ecotank we tried fed the narrow sheets wonky so we eventually made the switch to Sawgrass and ever since then have run two SG500’s. The SG500’s have far outlasted any Ecotank we’ve ever owned and the one we use for mugs has, to date, printed 167k mugs and hasn’t skipped a beat.
However, while I personally don’t mind paying £36 per cartridge, I am sick of being tied to Sawgrasses terrible colour management (or lack thereof). For the second time now I have a genuine Sawgrass Magenta cartridge that has too much red pigment in it which has resulted in loads of mugs wasted, and while I know from experience sawgrass will replace the cartridge, the same can’t be said for the mugs etc. If I had a printer that I could profile, I wouldn’t have this issue.
I also want to add an A3+ printer to our business and have consistent colours but unless I buy an SG1000 I’m not likely to achieve that with the SG500’s in the equation.
So…in terms of printing on mug sheets, I’d really like to know what you guys are all using. Is there a decent Epson printer out there that can handle the mug sheets without being wonky?
I know I’m not going to get an Epson that will print 167K mugs without dying and that’s ok, but as I say, I’m just sick of Sawgrass at this point.
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
