3rd Party Inks

[Signature Sign Guys]

Hey All,

so we are currently using a 3rd party ink in our roland xr-640 from rite-media and our suppliers have the Nazdar inks which they tell us are better and we should switch over. we havent had any issues with the rite-media inks and they are already cheaper than the roland inks.

I am just wondering if others have used them and what the quality is like?
Any input is great

Thanks

 

[iPrintStuff]

With any third party inks, there’s always risks. Depends how much of a saving you think you’ll make vs the chance you’ll have to replace everything the ink has touched (costly).

I’d probably go with the if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it method but it depends how much savings you stand to make. Ink costs are pretty minimal in the grand scheme of things.

 

[T Campbell]

Nazdar has a good reputation. I'd say its worth the look. What kind of printing are you doing?

 

[Signature Sign Guys]

Nazdar has a good reputation. I'd say its worth the look. What kind of printing are you doing?

Signage, banners, and vehicle wraps/graphics mostly. The odd poster print here and there

 

[Gino]

Is that a fact or a theory ??

Oh, and you should apply for a Merchant Membership before trying to solicit your stuff. It is the rules afterall.​

 

[unclebun]

Nazdar inks are why I replaced my Mimaki JV3 with an Epson S70670.

After our JV3 went out of warranty I started using whatever 3rd party ink Grimco was selling at the time. It worked fine, so when Nazdar started offering ink, since a friend of mine worked for them, I switched to Nazdar. They performed fine. For more than a year. But then we had a cyan print head go bad. Paid a bunch of money to have a tech come out and replace the head since I'd never done it before. Less than two weeks later the head we'd just replaced failed. Tech came back, replaced it again. This time I watched how it was done. A week later the same head failed again. I ordered a head and replaced it myself. And a week or two later it failed. At that point I was thousands of dollars into it and just gave up. I'd gone a month and a half without a working printer more than a few days at a time. Epson had just announced the new S series printers and I went to the factory demo at Grimco and bought one.

About a year later I get a letter from Nazdar saying they had a batch of bad cyan ink and to check my stock for the lot number. Sure enough, the cyan cartridge I had in the machine was from that lot. Called them up, tried to find out what was wrong with the ink, etc., but all I got was that if I sent them the bad cartridge they'd send me a replacement.

Didn't appreciate losing all the money I spent replacing heads and not being able to make signs, but Nazdar ink was the best thing that ever happened because they caused me to buy the Epson.

 

[autoexebat]

Don't mess with 3rd party inks , I've spent about $5000.00 in the last 1.5 years due to this and my little printing side biz only pulls in 12k a year so ... do yourself a favor and don't mess with them

 

[iPrintStuff]

There is definitely a time and a place for third party inks. I’ve found the less time in your machine, the better. They appear to be more suited to high volume shops that are running their machines all day every day. They worked for us because we could afford to buy a new head once a year or so because we were saving thousands a year on inks. Hell, coulda bought a head a month and still saved money via third party inks against OEM.

Thankfully we never actually had any problems with the inks. Did have a problem with the system but complained and got a new system for free.

people that aren’t running their machines regularly should probably stick to OEM. If you’re only doing say 12k worth of printing a year, the ink is going to be pennies in the grand scheme of things. Running third party probably isn’t worth the potential headaches.