recommendations

[bms]

or is that Martin joining under a different name

lol Excellent post though (no it's wasn't me or prompted by me)

[frizbee]

Hmmm never been called Martin before, no sure my mum would approve.

Difference between artanium and sublijet.

Pro's and Cons of Ink.

Pro's sublijet gives you really dark black, con's its more expensive and more limited who you can buy it from, for instance the ink for our 4880 is only availabel from Micro Partners or Novachrome, which helps keep the prices high.

Pro's of artanium, easily obtained, if buying with printer, but from BMS as a package, if buying seperately Purple Monkey sell the widest selection of different size botles, easy flow systems etc.

Of course sublijet is available for the new Ricoh, but I have had no experience of this printer yet, but would probably go that way whey we need the next one.

The most important bit is not to buy fake inks, I can't stress it enough as whatever anyone says they are not as good if it dosen't say sawgrass on the bottle, its no good. Sawgrass selll Rotech, Artanium & Sublijet anything else you see is imported. There are people on ebay saying this is sublijet, I buy in big bottles and rebottle to save you money. This is really unlikely as there woudl be litle money in it and if someone can find me sublijet by the litre I haev the money waiting.

And no I am nothing to do with Martin & BMS, but he is our supplier of mugs, we have tried the rest - Magic Touch, Xpres, NovaChrome and we have settled on his mugs as the best for us, we are a trade printer, our normal order size is about 288 mugs of a design so we need consistency of shape, size & Quality.

David

[Andrew]

I think the print quality has a lot to do with the profile you use or how far it has been developed for certain printers. We used to have Sublijet in the early days and had 1290's running. The blacks were greenish on this setup with Powerdriver. We next had 1800's again sublijet/powerdriver and the colours were perfect. We even downgraded the Powerdriver on to the Lite version to increase speed but the ease of use of that software and the results we were getting we are hard pushed to achieve now. The A4 version of this printer (800) never had the software developed as far as the 1800 set-up by Sawgrass and couldn't get the same results. Sawgrass seem to throw more weight behind certain printers and get a better software option.

I no longer use Sawgrass ink due to costs but to do this then you need to spend a lot more on software. This is where Sawgrass justify their high prices as they give the support and software largely for free which allows for a wide variety of people to get in the sublimation game. I obviously can't agree with David that any ink beyond Sawgrass is no good but do agree that importing any cheap unkown stuff from China is the wrong option.

[Greensleeves]

here is a link to the distributer i am thinking of buying from, [url="http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll? ... AQ:GB:1123]http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll? ... AQ:GB:1123[/url]

and here is his mugs
[url="http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/BOX-OF-36-SUBLIMA ... 2305f21211]http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/BOX-OF-36-SUBLIMA ... 2305f21211[/url]

[Paul]

dont buy it

there is what he recon:

Epson 6 colour printer with refillable cartridges much more reliable than the bulk feeding systems, .

BO*******X!

[frizbee]

For that ebay seller to say

"AS IVE SAID BEFORE THESE MUGS ARE THE BEST IVE EVER PRESSED AND ARE AS DISHWASHER SAFE AS A SUBLIMATION MUG CAN BE. MANY SELLERS WILL SAY DISHWASHER SAFE IM NOT GOING TO MAKE THAT STATEMENT AS HEAT APPLIES THE IMAGE AND THE ACIDS AND DETERGENTS IN MODERN DISHWASHER WILL "WEAKEN" THE IMAGE QUALTITY, IT PRETTY MUCH DEPENDS ON THE DISHWASHER. HOWEVER THESE ARE PROBABLY THE BEST SUBLIMATION MUG YOU WILL GET IN THE UK."

He obviously has never had a RN or Rhino coated mug, we dishwash our mugs everyday and they are as dark as the day they were printed.

Cheap mugs are cheap mugs, like all things sublimation there are good and bad, licensed and unlicensed. At the recent Printware & Promotion show we look at the mimaki large format sublimation printer, we grabbed some transfers to test from the rep, whist the process was easy and the speed was high, the blacks were poor.

Many comment about sawgrass, but no one has ever shown me a pantone correct process black printed mug using anything apart from sublijet, if they could I would pay for the info, I spend in excess of £1200 each time we swap our carts on the 4880, if we could do this with bulk ink we would be converted as it woudl save a fortune, but we need real support as we print in runs of 1000's of mugs and all have to be the same colour.,

[bms]

MANY SELLERS WILL SAY DISHWASHER SAFE IM NOT GOING TO MAKE THAT STATEMENT AS HEAT APPLIES THE IMAGE AND THE ACIDS AND DETERGENTS IN MODERN DISHWASHER WILL "WEAKEN" THE IMAGE QUALTITY, IT PRETTY MUCH DEPENDS ON THE DISHWASHER

If the supplier can't give assurances that the mugs are dishwasher safe then assume they aren't and when customers wash them in the dishwasher you should expect the image to fade. If you're going to use these mugs then assume they are not dishwasher safe. The RN coated mugs we supply are totally dishwasher safe/ proof (or whatever else you want to call it). We tested them for well over 3 months washing daily in a domestic dishwasher with the powerful Finish PowerBall tablet - nothing happened to the image.

[JSR]

dont buy it

there is what he recon:

Epson 6 colour printer with refillable cartridges much more reliable than the bulk feeding systems, .

BO*******X!

Oddly, the second picture in that auction includes a box that says "continuous ink". Sounds like he might be keeping the Artanium-filled CISS for himself (he clearly has one, judging by the box) and flogging a non-brand ink & cartridge system in the auction.

On the subject of dishwasher-safe mugs, I have an information page on my site at http://www.mugsandgifts.co.uk/dishwashing-mugs from when I did some tests on different types of coated mugs a while ago. It certainly opened my eyes to only buying RN-coated mugs whenever possible.

[Greensleeves]

Well Hi guys and galls im back. I am glad now i did not go for the easyflow system. Problems kept occuring when it was being transported in the back of a van. Air lock was the big one. I am using cs4 and was wonderg in if i can place 3 different mug templates on print preview using the epson r265 printer?

[Kaz]

If you can fit 3 different templates to the one page, I dont see why not