Budget Solution ?

[BobAsher]

Hi, first post, so please don't hurt me :biggrin:

I bought some stuff for doing mugs, t shirts and caps etc (I have a gift shop in small a holiday town, so not trying to 'enter the market' in the traditional ebay/online sense).

I'll confess I bought cheap EBay sub inks and refillable carts just to try the whole operation out.

I was also quite please with the mug stuff, which worked much better than I expected it to and under some limitations of colours and graphics, I'm quite pleased with it all.

So, I've got to the point where quite a lot of people get to where, for dye sub stuff, I'm hitting the old colour mismatch problems. My paper is currently unbranded as is my ink.

As this is only going to be a sideline in my shop, printing a few mugs and shirts, is there an actual workable alternative to paying £230 for a set of inks of known origin and available ICC profile ? Is there an option somewhere between the £40 ink I've been buying and the £230 it would cost for a set of Sawgrass carts ??

Cheers,

Bob

Edit - Should have said, printer is a Ricoh 3110

[BobAsher]

Just realised that the paper I bought from eBay was the ink-Express stuff, so that should really be OK ?

Will buy some of their inks also to see if I can get better colour matching with them.

[socialgiraffe]

Ink Express guys are good guys and also supplier members of this forum (which means discount for premium members hint hint).

You will need to flush out your old inks and get some ink, paper from them and just as important speak to them about getting a profile for your printer.

I am going to try and tag them so they hopefully will pick this up with you

[InkExpress]

Thanks for the tag Socialgiraffe

Bob, we have specific dye sublimation inks for RICOH printers that are of good quality and are manufactured for us in the USA. We have ICC profiles for that ink set and our paper that you are using.

I found RICOH printers were always a little flawed in how they printed even with ICC profiles but people who have purchased my inks and had the profile supplied (for free) have always given me good feedback and reports. Granted its not quite up to Sawgrass quality but at £39.00 for a set of 4 x 100ml its far cheaper and the price far out weighs the small variation in quality over Sawgrass inks.

Here are some mug samples produced using a RICOH SG2100N our ink set and our subli-sharp paper with ICC profile. As with all RICOH prints the red does come out a little orange but after testing 5-6 ink sets from various suppliers we found they all did this to a degree and put it down to the way the printers print.

Overall its a good ink set which produces good dense blacks and bright vibrant colours.

Alex

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[BobAsher]

Ink ordered (and delivered) from Ink Express. ICC Profile on CD included. Will try it out tomorrow.