New printer recommendations?

[Mountain1]

We have a 360 installing next week to replace a 26500. It is impressive.

 

[Tim Aucoin]

Well, after 4 years my 25500 is in need of some extensive (and expensive) repair. Tech tells me the carriage needs replacing. The C/LC printheads are "unstable", and causing nothing but grief! They are moving around and losing proper contact causing major colour shifts in prints. After a run I will get a message telling me to "replace faulty C/LC printhead", the printheads are NEW! They're also the 5th and 6th that HP has replaced on warranty, so I know it's not the printheads. Just this morning I had to toss out 15 prints (24" x 36") because of this issue. Swapped out printheads (from slot 1 to slot 2 and vice versa), re-ran the job and it is fine, but it really is hit and miss over the last 8 months.

I think rather than spend the $$$ on fixing up this printer I am going to trade it in on a new L360. From what I've been reading on here, folks with the L360 seem to love it. I have the RIP, so I should be able to get this for under $20K. Will be interesting to see how much I get for a trade-in on this old L5500!!

 

[Pegler911]

I can tell you what not to buy - an HP26500 Latex, or a used HP25500 Latex. Both dreadful. Both unreliable. Both expensive and have little to no tech support. Dynamic of prints is fairly dull (our old Roland SC540 solvent wipes the floor with them) and the time they take to produce this underwhelming stuff is so frustrating.

 

[nate]

I can tell you what not to buy - an HP26500 Latex, or a used HP25500 Latex. Both dreadful. Both unreliable. Both expensive and have little to no tech support. Dynamic of prints is fairly dull (our old Roland SC540 solvent wipes the floor with them) and the time they take to produce this underwhelming stuff is so frustrating.

Wow-- I'd beg to differ on that. At one point we had 14 of them here in the shop working on a particular project. We worked them hard-- usually 16 hour days, and they were nothing but exceptional.