Brother DCP - J4120 mixed feelings

[Customprintwales]

Bought a Brother J4120 a week or so ago having given up on the Epson WF7110 and have mixed feelings over it.

Firstly it is a cheap A3 printer costing only £79 from Amazon and add on £20 for empty refillable cartridges and it is a cheap £100 printer to get me through Christmas until I can spend time researching a more robust printer - possible a Sawgrass one.

For the price you can not fault the print quality however there are 2 issues which is annoying.

1. The colours are more muted than the Epsom especially on deeper greens and other dark colours. I don't know whether the Epsons have a wider colour gamut or it is just an ICC profile issue. Fortunately as most of my prints is artwork rather than photographs the problem in not major.

2. The most annoying thing is that I have to do a nozzle check and head clean after almost every print. I think there was a previous post on Brother printers about this issue and that the vacuum sucks the thicker sublimation ink back into the cartridge after printing. I tried to remove the plugs to solve it but that did not work.

Overall for a short term measure - there really only about 12 days left for Christmas orders taking into account last posting dates - it's not too bad and will keep me going.

I made my money back on the cost in 2 days and have had substantially less down time in the last week or so than I would have had had I bought another Epson WF7110.

Hopefully the Sawgrass printer will be reliable over the long term.

[webtrekker]

You're talking here about an A3 printer, which will probably be an SG800 if you go down the Sawgrass route. Have you seen the price of those things? :frown: Certainly a lot dearer than the Brother machine or the Epson! However, I suppose you will get full support from Sawgrass (providing you buy their inks?) and could prove to be a more reliable route in the long run.

[Customprintwales]

I'm not too concerned about the cost, it's the reliability I'm after.

In the last 8 months I've spent
3 x £170 on Epson WF7110 printers another £100 on this Brother and then add on all the downtime, wasted paper , inks and substrates. The cancelled orders as another printer goes down.

I recon it's costed me well over £1,000 in the last few months, enough to buy and Sawgrass printer

Sometimes it's time to call it a day and go professional.