Bought a Ricoh 3350 to test as a sublimation printer with non-Sawgrass/non-gel inks

[pisquee]

Couple of new Ricoh 3350 printers ordered, along with some refill carts - determined to find out for myself how well they work with non-Sawgrass sublimation inks once and for all, rather than going by what Sawgrass say, or what others have said in the past.
Will report my findings (whatever they end up being) here.

I'm not saying everyone should ditch their Sawgrass inks, or Sawgrass warrantied/supported systems, and buy unlicensed inks, I just want to find out the truth.

[John G]

Will be interesting to hear your findings.

[socialgiraffe]

Ditto there

[viccar]

I will also be watching with interest.

[Simon]

Yeah, me too

[mrs maggot]

"Bishop Aukland Gazette report mystery fire at local business" - no honestly that is a joke, it will be very good to hear of your results

[pisquee]

Is that from the printers blowing up from the dangerous act of putting the "wrong" inks in, or Sawgrass sending round the boys so the truth doesn't get out?!

[JSR]

Couple of new and Ricoh 3350 printers ordered, along with some refill carts - determined to find out for myself how well they work with non-Sawgrass sublimation inks once and for all, rather than going by what Sawgrass say, or what others have said in the past.
Will report my findings (whatever they end up being) here.

I'm not saying everyone should ditch their Sawgrass inks, or Sawgrass warrantied/supported systems, and buy unlicensed inks, I just want to find out the truth.

I'm very interested in this. Keep us informed.

That said, I seem to have been reading a number of threads recently about Ricoh issues that have resulted in the owner being directed to Sawgrass for support - almost as though Ricoh aren't the nirvana that they seemed to be when first made available. I'm not sure I'd want to risk the expense of a Ricoh printer without that backup. It's different if you can get the printer for next to nothing and the brand doesn't have a history of issues.

But I'm still very interested in your results. I'd like to do the same thing on some of those Workforce printers with the massive-capacity cartridges (with cartridges up to 63ml capacity - and one model will take a black cartridge up to a staggering 181ml capacity...), but I don't have spare money at present to do another experiment.

[pisquee]

Only 181ml capacity?! Our proper printers carts are around 300ml, and can be converted to take the inks straight from the litre bottles

But, yeah, Ricoh don't have a great rep when it comes to being used for sub, but this has pretty much all being with Sawgrass inks, which lots of people also have problems with in Epson printers of all shapes and sizes. So, let's take a proper industrial/commercial ink and see how it works in the Ricoh instead.

[JSR]

Well, 181ml is large to those of us that only have 100ml cartridges...

Mind you, it's positively astonishing for an Epson printer - the company that invented thimble sized cartridges so small that "one whiff and it's empty" (oh, hang on, that was HP wasn't it? :biggrin:).