very confused

[hughb40]

I went for the Ricoh purely because I don't sublimate every day.. so didn't want to run the risk of having any blockages.. and therefore any down time..

If I leave my Ricoh on for a couple of days because i'm using it, it does routine maintainance itself.. and then when I am not using it.. which can be up to a week at a time.. it's worked perfect every time it's started up..

Just to add my two pennyworth, we got through 2 Epson R1800s over the years and when they were good they were very good but boy were they (in our experience) fussy beast and sooo prone to clogging! Had CISS for both of them and ended up putting in the separate ink waste tank (as you drill through casing you do think there goes the warranty!) and it is depressing(and expensive) to see how much ink gets flushed in cleans. And they even clogged overnight from one job to the next on occasion so it wasn't like they had been left for a while......anyway finally threw in the towel and got Ricoh GX7000 a year or so ago with Sublijet R ink carts and Powerdriver and love it love it love it I have nothing but praise for it - it has earned its keep for us! I appreciate there is a cost/benefit analysis that works different ways for different folks according to needs and work profile but its Ricoh for us!

[bigj2552]

Absolute rubbish, certainly on UK Ebay, there is only one real make of ink and that is InkTec. OK, it is only licensed for large format printers, and only allowed to be sold in litre quantities, but it is far from "cheap" in terms of being low quality, or inferior. Look at the papers and tests InkTec have done, but also the FLAAR report. It is bulk ink intended for professional use, on large expensive printers (costing £1000s not £100s) and for printing onto large runs of textiles (it can be used for printing directly onto poly textiles, not just using sublimation transfer paper) - an environment where they don't want a printer going down due to blockages, or a print not coming out print and 100s metres of fabric having to be binned. Yes, it isn't a "household name" as it is not intended to be used by 'small users' but in industry. It is very good ink from Korea, so not to be confused with the common phrased "cheap Chinese ink." The cheap chinese and/or unlicenced sublimation ink usually disappears from Ebay pretty quick, but InkTec inks are there and not disappearing because they are licensed by Sawgrass, and an official product in their eyes.
Please note: Not only am I a dealer for InkTec in the UK, but also a very happy user of their inks, both sublimation and pigment. I am not posting this to attract sales, but it does frustrate me when people keep saying to avoid the inks on Ebay - as they can only really be referring to InkTec. I am certainly not the only InkTec sublimation ink seller on Ebay, but I have been doing it the longest, and have many happy customers. I happily offer support and help to them on the phone and in emails, both pre and post sale.

OK, got that off my chest - can get on with getting the trade show stuff finalised ready for tomorrow.

think you missed the bit where i said - most -but not all - and i,m NOT refering to INKTEC inks at all bud.
maybe i should have not tarred them with the cheap crap when posting this !
i take it back - not all ebayers sell crap ! - but most do !!

[hughb40]

It would certainly be interesting and useful to the end-user if Sawgrass improved their offerings to be the very best ink on the market, which would encourage us all to use it because it turned out to be the best. As it is now, we all end up using Sawgrass ink for fear of legal implications - it doesn't matter whether the ink is the best or a pile of donkey-doings, we have no choice.

I'm sure we'd much rather be using the best ink available, rather than having legal wranglings force us into buying a single product that could be the worst.

Absolutely, torn between the 'if it aint broke don't fix it' route and 'are we getting the best out of our equipment' with old technology - or is it new technology ink - we don't know! Having suffered windows upgrades from 3.1 (yes I go that far back lol) to ME to 2000/NT to XP to that useless crock of *** Vista and now Win 7 64 bit (that seems to have no drivers for equipment ) I kind of like the comfort zone of if it aint broke don't fix it! But monopolies drive me nuts and sometimes competition drives advances that are beneficial....

[Paul]

Regards to cloging with my epsons in the past lt was all caused only when hooked up to the ciss. Ciss systems are poorly made and get the air in and thats what cas the clog. Not drying ink. Its an air!
Btw. And i had all sorts of ciss. sawgrass one, posh expensive from city ink and some cheaper ones from china. Build quality warry but i must admit all of them was saffering of head air locking. After swaped crap, useless ciss with refillables my problems ended.

My 2p :-)

[JSR]

Just to add my two pennyworth, we got through 2 Epson R1800s over the years and when they were good they were very good but boy were they (in our experience) fussy beast and sooo prone to clogging!

In my view, the Epson R1800 should *never* have been adopted by Sawgrass as a dye-sub printer. They did it because they panicked themselves into thinking that it was the replacement for the 1290S. No one with even half a braincell believed that, and this was proven when the 1400 came along.

The R1800 was specifically designed for pigment inks with the capacity for a very tiny droplet size down to 1.5pl. It's an 8-tank printer but, for dye-sub, you're not using 8 colours to print with. The printer has two blacks - optimised for either matt or glossy paper. You're only ever going to use one black for dye-sub. The other will just disappear into the waste tank during cleaning cycles. The printer has a gloss optimiser to compensate for the gloss differential of pigment inks. You never use that with dye-sub, so you're provided with "cleaning solution" that, just like the extra black, is only there to disappear into the waste tank during cleaning cycles.

The printer has full-Red and full-Blue inks to compensate for the weak colour gamut of pigment inks in the red and blue regions. For 99% of your prints, you'll never need these. Many dye-sub inksets work just fine without a full red or full blue ink, with just the CMYK. Which leaves the other four inks of the R1800, which are CMYK.

For the vast majority of prints, you're only going to be using those four CMYK colours. The GOP/PK/RD/BU inks are largely irrelevant. Using the R1800 as a dye-sublimation printer is the printing equivalent of putting a square peg in a round hole. It's a superb printer when using pigment inks for full-colour photographs with glossy paper for long-term fade resistant purposes, but for dye-sub? No, I don't think so.

Dye-sublimation ink is a thick ink for which there is no especially-designed desktop printer. At some stage it will go wrong. Shoving it in a £400 printer, or that £2K+ one that was recently announced, is something you only do when you're afflicted with "too much disposable money syndrome". (And, boy, do I wish I suffered from that!)

I do have an Epson R1800 here, but I wouldn't put dye-sub ink into it if it was the last printer I had here.