Roll to Roll Printers for Backlit?

[Electra Sign]

Looking for some recommendations/advice (from real users) on 60" roll to roll printers that will be primarily used for outdoor backlit sign cabinets?

The 3 models we are currently looking at are:
Color Painter M-64s
Mimaki JV300
HP Latex 570

 

[BigfishDM]

Latex all the way! (The colorpainter does pretty good backlit too)

 

[Andy D]

I'm not familiar with those models, do they print white? If not, the
only proper way to print back lit images in one layer is with a printer that prints
white inks.

 

[ams]

Any solvent, eco-solvent, UV or latex will work for backlit signage. I recommend staying away from all 3 of those.

-HP, expensive repairs, expensive ink, etc.
-Mimaki, terrible tech support and service
-Colorpainter, off brand stick with the professional printers.

 

[BigfishDM]

I'm not familiar with those models, do they print white? If not, the
only proper way to print back lit images in one layer is with a printer that prints
white inks.

The very best way is to use a lightjet on duratrans. I do agree having white is killer for doing backlit on clear film.

 

[Christian @ 2CT Media]

Any solvent, eco-solvent, UV or latex will work for backlit signage. I recommend staying away from all 3 of those.

-HP, expensive repairs, expensive ink, etc.
-Mimaki, terrible tech support and service
-Colorpainter, off brand stick with the professional printers.

You are kidding right? HP latex is the cheapest ink of any of the machines in it's price range OEM to OEM. And the colorpainter is not a off brand at all, it's been around for 10+ years and is a mid industrial solvent machine.

Back to the OP we use our latest for Backlit all the time with great results.

 

[chafro]

I am a duratrans printer and our Latex backlights come pretty darn close to our duratrans. Also worth mentioning that the Lx1500 and 3000 can print better backlights than the smaller latex printers. This is because smaller printers can't dry the amount of ink the big ones can.

You will need a barbieri and a good RIP to profile backlights, that's the key of printing duratrans like backlights.

You don't mention them but UV backlights are also very good.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

[ikarasu]

Any solvent, eco-solvent, UV or latex will work for backlit signage. I recommend staying away from all 3 of those.

-HP, expensive repairs, expensive ink, etc.
-Mimaki, terrible tech support and service
-Colorpainter, off brand stick with the professional printers.

You might be confused by color painter. It's a Seiko Color painter... Seiko isn't an off brand. It's a pretty popular brand lots of shops use / support. We have one, and it's great. I haven't seen another Eco-solvent print as good as the CP in its price range.

I still recommend the latex though. I don't like Eco-solv... It prints great, and has its uses, but Latex is instant dry, cheaper ink, and latex isn't expensive in repairs. We've had a head with deflected nozzles... It still prints ok, but black text is fuzzy because of it on our Seiko. $4000 replacement... A few heads are about 6 years old, so they have a couple deflected nozzles. It still prints good, but it doesn't print perfect. Stuff like small text is where it's noticeable... $16,000 in just parts to get the printer to print perfect. I printed some of the decals we're doing on my latex 110 I own, brought them into work to compare... and it's night and day. The eco-solv, when brand new probably printed just as good as the latex, but as it ages / things get damaged... and it's a $16,000 repair. The latex.... The heads are consumables, $100 per head, replace it every couple months depending on printing usage, and the machine will print like it's brand new through out the life of the printer.

It boggles my mind why anyone would buy anything besides latex right now for roll to roll. I've used a HP FB500, H2-74 color painter, Mimaki CJV, And Latex... by far the latex is my favorite, and I've been doing everything I can to convince the bosses not to spend $16k to refresh the solvent, and spend 30k to buy the latex instead.


That said, theres other considerations. Find out who has techs in your area. In ours, only 1 company services the Seiko. 3 Service the Latex, 2 the HP UV, and 2 the mimaki. We've never waited more than a day for parts for our HP Flatbed, it seems like HP parts are stocked better in Vancouver area. We've had to wait over a week before while something was rushed out of Japan for a Seiko part though. I'm sure HP has some obscure parts you may have to wait for, but everytime we needed a part for Seiko it was a couple days wait, which sucked for time sensitive projects.

 

[ams]

You are kidding right? HP latex is the cheapest ink of any of the machines in it's price range OEM to OEM. And the colorpainter is not a off brand at all, it's been around for 10+ years and is a mid industrial solvent machine.

Back to the OP we use our latest for Backlit all the time with great results.

I know a couple guys in town who are paying out the ass for ink.

 

[ams]

You might be confused by color painter. It's a Seiko Color painter... Seiko isn't an off brand. It's a pretty popular brand lots of shops use / support. We have one, and it's great. I haven't seen another Eco-solvent print as good as the CP in its price range.

I still recommend the latex though. I don't like Eco-solv... It prints great, and has its uses, but Latex is instant dry, cheaper ink, and latex isn't expensive in repairs. We've had a head with deflected nozzles... It still prints ok, but black text is fuzzy because of it on our Seiko. $4000 replacement... A few heads are about 6 years old, so they have a couple deflected nozzles. It still prints good, but it doesn't print perfect. Stuff like small text is where it's noticeable... $16,000 in just parts to get the printer to print perfect. I printed some of the decals we're doing on my latex 110 I own, brought them into work to compare... and it's night and day. The eco-solv, when brand new probably printed just as good as the latex, but as it ages / things get damaged... and it's a $16,000 repair. The latex.... The heads are consumables, $100 per head, replace it every couple months depending on printing usage, and the machine will print like it's brand new through out the life of the printer.

It boggles my mind why anyone would buy anything besides latex right now for roll to roll. I've used a HP FB500, H2-74 color painter, Mimaki CJV, And Latex... by far the latex is my favorite, and I've been doing everything I can to convince the bosses not to spend $16k to refresh the solvent, and spend 30k to buy the latex instead.


That said, theres other considerations. Find out who has techs in your area. In ours, only 1 company services the Seiko. 3 Service the Latex, 2 the HP UV, and 2 the mimaki. We've never waited more than a day for parts for our HP Flatbed, it seems like HP parts are stocked better in Vancouver area. We've had to wait over a week before while something was rushed out of Japan for a Seiko part though. I'm sure HP has some obscure parts you may have to wait for, but everytime we needed a part for Seiko it was a couple days wait, which sucked for time sensitive projects.

I run away when I hear Seiko.

 

[Christian @ 2CT Media]

I know a couple guys in town who are paying out the *** for ink.

Then they should look elsewhere, HP has the latex Ink price locked to $135 for the 775s and $375 for the 3Ls.

 

[boxerbay]

We had a seiko64s and when new was great. A bit smelly with the solvent inks. Long runs we had to open the bay door. Then as it got older it required more head cleanings to avoid the random drop out. It became a bit cumbersome to do long runs. We now have an EPSON GS6000 and have put hundreds of rolls through it no problem. Backlits on the ecosolvent always looked a bit washed out and we would have to bump up the saturation in photoshop before we printed them. For backlits we like to use a translucent white film. We run it on either the canon ipf9400 or the CET flatbed. Much better richer results on the AQ machine or the UV machine. Not familiar with Latex so I'm not help there.

 

[Electra Sign]

Thanks so much for the feedback everyone!

We have gotten print samples done from all 3 units and all are quite comparable (quality wise) and print costs are pretty even across the board. We are coming from an early generation Latex Machine (LX600) that had print head issues so we wanted to explore Eco-Solvent again this go around. Although all 3 models print quality backlits, we have some concerns about dry times on the solvent models (given the amount of ink laid down) and Latex would solve this issue. Consumable print heads on the Latex seems like a scary thing to go through again but some good points about print quality over time not diminishing is a strong argument for sure, coupled with the high replacement cost of Piezo heads even though the last a long time.

 

[boxerbay]

also has to do with ink opacity. solvent inks are thinner more translucent so it is hard to build up richness. a new latex might be the way to go.

 

[Christian @ 2CT Media]

What is your rear of consumable printhead or what have you experienced?

 

[Solventinkjet]

I'd be curious to see a study on the lifetime cost of running solvent and latex. If you take care of a solvent printer, your $2000 heads should last 5+ years. I have seen heads last up to 9 years in some cases. If you have to replace a latex head every couple months at $100 a pop, you could easily be paying more to keep the machine alive in the long run.

 

[Christian @ 2CT Media]

I have records on my last 3 generations of Latex. our 360 before it got replaced had 6 total heads replaced in 1 year and 129,000sqft through it. Our L26500 had 9 head changes in 2 years and 138,000sqft. Our L25500 had 22 head changes due to crashing mostly in 3 years and nearly 200,000sqft.

Our new HP570 has 135,000sqft in 10 weeks and only 1 complete head change.

 

[Solventinkjet]

I have records on my last 3 generations of Latex. our 360 before it got replaced had 6 total heads replaced in 1 year and 129,000sqft through it. Our L26500 had 9 head changes in 2 years and 138,000sqft. Our L25500 had 22 head changes due to crashing mostly in 3 years and nearly 200,000sqft.

Our new HP570 has 135,000sqft in 10 weeks and only 1 complete head change.

Interesting. Thanks for posting that. So in 6 years you spent about $3700 on heads. I am wondering why the machines were repalced so much. Just upgrading or do they wear out that fast?

 

[Christian @ 2CT Media]

The 25500 needed a heater which was around $3800 at the time so we upgraded to the 26500. Then the 26500 just got upgraded because we needed the faster 360 for a job we were doing. The 360 got replaced with the 365 because there was a electrical issue that took 5 weeks to fix and they requested a replacement after replacing nearly the entire system in the printer. The 2 570s were added for these large projects.

 

[Ahmed Samy Nagada]

We use 3 printers HP Z6100, much much more better quality than our Latex L26500 and Mutoh 1624, outstanding quality very fast and the durability of pigmented ink is excellent indoors and outdoors.