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Flatbed Opinions Wanted

K

klmiller611

New Member
Hi Everybody!

I just recently joined and have been reading with great interest on the various equipment. Apologies in advance for the overlong post.

We are a trade show decorator and do a fair amount of display materials, signs and all for trade shows. Mostly gatorfoam, coroplast and portable display on tyvek. We had previously printed on an old HP 2500, which died in January. We are presently subbing all of our printing out.

My boss has wanted a flatbed for some time, so I began researching back in December and went to Sign Expo in Orlando. We decided on the Gerber Solara Ion and ordered one in mid April, it is scheduled to ship late October (at least the third ship date we've had). Since July, we have been getting concerned with the continued delays, and are coming into our busy season right now and are strongly considering changing to another machine.

The machines we are considering are the Mimaki JF-1630, the Agfa Anapurna-M, the Solara Ion or the Lexjet Legend.

I just got samples of our files on the Agfa and the Ion this morning on Tyvek, which is about 30-40 percent of our work. IMHO, the Agfa blows the Ion away in color saturation and image quality. The sample from Mimaki left a bit to be desired and the Legend looked good as well.

My boss is a super picky person and does not like the banding we have seen on some samples. But he likes the idea of the gantry system of printing which is mostly why we ordered the Ion to start with.

Does anyone out here have any of the printers we are looking at, and willing to offer some opinions?

Obviously, we are spending a fair amount of money here, and want to get the best deal for what we need, and quality we want. In our shop, speed is not the most important thing, we are generally not turning out the volume that most folks will. What we are looking at is image quality, price, ease of maintenance and reliability.

Thanks in advance for your thoughts.

Ken
 
K

ksc

New Member
We are going with the ion we have owned other type grit roller UV flat bed printers the material has to be flat or the heads hit... Coroplast all most wont print at all we wast a lot of ink and materials (dibond is to slippery) Meteral won feed properly ((( (time) (just like dos to (windows) is behind the times so is the grit roller type uv printers) (please see my other posts under flat bed printers) Ion or similar type printers are best...if you look in to gerbers back ground thay are the most stable corporation around ,,, do yo know gerber invented the first vinyl ploter not to mention the large format printer.....
 
jdigital

jdigital

New Member
We are selling our Zund 215+ UV printer, 6 color CMYKLcLM. Still a great machine .If anyone interested, PM me
 
G

grfx_flem

New Member
ion

we have an ion running in our shop....well, sometimes running in our shop. be cautious, and have a lemon clause in your contract when you purchase one. when the machine works, it is ok. ink cost is high, much higher than they tell you....they forget to mention how much ink you waste cleaning the print heads. I would recommend going to a shop that has one, and ask the users how they feel about it.
 
E

econolinesigns

New Member
We have an Ion which has been up and running for about three weeks now. It was down for one and one-half days but Gerber sent a tech out from back east and had it running fine. So far we have not had to do anyting at anything other than 360 eight pass (which gets rid of most if not all of the banding).

grfx flem - you may want to have your distributors tech or a factory tech look at the vacuum pump used by the ink distribution system - ours came with a bad one from the factory and we found that in the beginning the ink use on the 40 hour cleaning was really high. Once the pump was replaced, this dropped to a pretty acceptable level. Three weeks, about $30-$40k in work on it and we have not had to replace any of the inks yet (although our cyan and yellow are getting low)
 
K

klmiller611

New Member
Thanks for the commentary, we actually got samples from our files on the Ion, and they were terrible, so we cancelled our order on it, even though we were only 30 days or so from delivery. We went to SIGA and looked closely at the Mimaki JF 1630, Fuji Acuity and the Agfa Anapurna Mv. After a lot of careful consideration including price, we went with the Agfa. I hope it is going to be a wise investment. Wish me luck! Thanks.
 
fozzyber

fozzyber

New Member
not bad, in the ball park of an ion, I hope to be able to be in the Flat bed market in 1-2 years, so I'm starting to keep an eye out, and make plans
 
E

Egbert

New Member
We also received samples from Gerber ION and they were so bad we allowed them to send another set. I performed a simple tape test on the 2nd samples and the ink came off in large patch just using low tack masking tape (the 3M blue tape). That ended our research on the ION.
 
fozzyber

fozzyber

New Member
I like the way the ION looks and is setup with the roll to roll, good size, low heat lamps OK price. BUT I was surprised at how slow it was. Now I'm hearing about the ink not sticking I don't think it is going to make the short list
 
C

CarolinaCabinet

New Member
Nobody even comes close to efi VUTEk when it comes to flatbed UV printing.... the problem is paying for it, but you get what you pay for.... they are obviously only for HIGH volume and HIGH expectation clientel, however. But they are amazing. I love it so much. You can do pretty much anything you can imagine.
 
National Sign Co. - Print

National Sign Co. - Print

Merchant Member
I would agree with the Vutek UV part. I just came back from a visit of the Vutek plant today and was blown away by what they got going on.

UV curable technology yes. Flatbed technology No. We own 2 Gandi Flatbeds and our loyal HP/Scitex Clients that have just purchased a Vutex UV roll to roll machine. Funny how things work in a technology driven industry.

Vutek has the best Hybrid flatbed but not the best bed only dedicated flatbed.

The HP/Scitex FB 6100(Nur Tempo) hands down is the best flatbed machine that exists. Unless of course you want to layout 1+ million to step into the new faltbed arena (No thanks).

For the Mid end machines I would by all means go with the Agfa(Dilli). Plus I think Kmiller your rep for Agfa is Steve Potthoff formally of HP/Scitex. He is a great guy to work with and knows the game and how to make you a serious return on your purchase. Trust me on that....
 
petepaz

petepaz

New Member
we are going to the show in ac hunting for uv printers
haven't narrowed it down yet but i know we want white ink capabilities
i have heard a couple of stories as far as beds not being strong enough
for the materials and the feeder going off track
 
jdigital

jdigital

New Member
IF its affordable, I would suggest Inca flatbeds. Great machines. Have you seen the Inca Onset? WOW. way out of my range awesome machine though
 
K

ksc

New Member
The ion printer is cool .........It does all that they say it will do...it uses more ink thin my old UV printer did But the work actually gets done....short learning curve....Prints on almost every Thing......self adjusting highth sensor for materials works flawlessly...
 
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