best flatbed for fine art printing

[chafro]

Swissqprint, for sure!! we do a lot of acrylic mirror Prints, aluminum and many other material for fine art gallery prints.

We also do a lot of silver halide facemounts on acrylic for fine art and our direct print acrylics with the Swissqprint get very close on quality. On big sizes you can’t see the difference.

Quality is amazing, reliability second to none and they are made to last. Ours is 4 years old and prints as day one. One or two Tec visits in the 4 years!! still outperforms quality of all UV printers I have seen. The printer can be a high volumen production printer at high speeds if you need to.

We got 8000 4x8s in 14 days with ours for a corrugated plastic proyect.

 

[axelmk]

buzzgraphics, Have you looked at the new LATEX HP Flatbed r1000 or r2000?
It is a Flatbed and Roll to Roll.
We are getting ours installed this week. The Tests we did in Atlanta with our own files were amazing.
Price range is for the r1000 model is 160K
Since we will be testing for installation purposes anyway, if you want send me a test file and I will gladly run it for you.

 

[Classic1935]

Hi,

we run two Oce Arizonas 250GT and 350XT. Practically the same machines up to format and white on 350. The 250 is already more then 10 year in our shop and have nearly 30.000 sqm on the clock, but work perfect and print quality is still comparable with almost any new machine. Definitely in fine art class when we talk about UV flat bad printers. The print speed is low, especially with white ink on 350, but quality is great and service costs are very low, unfortunately the ink is quite expensive. Generally the Arizonas / Fuji Aquity are great machines for the money and able to make fine art printing for sure. They are almost so good like the Oce sales personality say they are.

 

[buzzgraphics]

wow! I let this simmer for a couple days and I come back to a wealth of information. thank you so much for all the reports and offers. I'm going to do some research on all these options and hopefully have a clearer idea of what will work for us. I may look at some used upper end machines to get closer to my price range too. Sounds like a well maintained 4 year old machine may be up to the task as well as a new one. Speed isn't a huge issue for us right now anyways, but quality is.

 

[johnnysigns]

We spent the last 6 months looking at Acuitys, Arizonas, Mimakis, and a handful of other machines. We settled on the Vanguard vk300. We need to be able to reproduce both fine art quality in short runs and a massive amount of coroplast on long runs and we've been very happy with the choice. The Fuji/Oce platforms all seemed to have some level of banding and the best response we got from either side was to run the machine slower. That was from lower hour pre-owned dual head machines to the newer 1200 series based platform. I don't know what else runs the Kyocera heads, but I would look hard at the Vanguard.

 

[Broome Signs]

hi
can recomend the oce we run the arisona 250 gt
(fuji is a rebranded oce)

 

[Raum Divarco]

Hey guys, I'm looking to add a flatbed to the mix (we have a couple of Mutoh ecosol printers). This machine would be primarily printing on plywood blanks at high resolutions (fine art). I've been eyeballing these machines for a while, but we've gotten to a point where we outsource enough of this stuff to justify having a piece of equipment in house (hopefully). While we may do other work with the machine, the fine art will be its focus.

anybody have any recommendations for something like this?

hardware/software aside, how is your pre-press work for color correction etc.? Especially for art and reproduction work, even if a press is slow, perfection is important. I have seen many good combos with good designers and acutiys/arizonas.

 

[Nickprints]

I strongly disagree with Oce supporters on being able to keep up with machines like the Agfa Jeti Mira, or vutek products. Ive had them side by side in shop and Oce was by far the slowest and worst producing out of the three. Jeti Mira has production issues with ink bubbles due to carriage speed, vutek has sensor issues but the OCE 350 and 550 are crap

 

[JoDa]

Nickprints you say the Oce 350 and 550 are crap. These units are probably 8 years old by now and probably weren’t maintained properly either by the end user or perhaps service not being performed regularly.

A customer of mine is just about to replace his Oce Arizona 250 GT with a newer model. This unit is 10 years old. All nozzles firing, and they produce high Quality POP work on it daily. All Arizona’s use a true variable dot from 6-42 picoliters, and like any other printers, in the right mode will produce top quality imagery.

I’ll put an Arizona image, up against any other flatbed...any day of the week. Give me a quality operator, quality image, same or equal ink combinations and the right print mode for the image...

Obviously some printers are faster, have different features, different price points, etc...but most of the time problems are preventable either through maintenance or regular service...too many operators cut corners or owners don’t want to pay for regular maintenance resulting in image problems. Usually as a printer ages problems occur...it’s to be expected with all brands...unless it’s a well maintained Arizona...

 

[jay etheredge]

Keep in mind too that print quality owes much to the printheads. Kyocera heads are currently the fastest with the smallest droplet size, so consider printers that use that head (there are several).

Kyocera are temperamental and expensive. Konica i are the best all around. Fast and high quality. Swiss Q uses them and others as well. You can print 4 x 8 in 90 seconds, but for fine art, slow that down to 2.5 to 3 minutes. Kyocera are two channel heads, have an issue with one color, you have to replace 2 colors... No moving printheads around, same goes for Ricoh which are also dog slow. TRust me, many times over the course of the last 6 years I've saved a customer from buying a printhead by switching K or M head with Yellow. Can't do that with a 2 channel head. Just another reason not to go with them. Hit me up if you want more info.

 

[jay etheredge]

Talk to Best Framing in Costa Mesa, They are huge in fine art printing and use a flora. International Molding as well they are in Alabama

 

[jay etheredge]

Nickprints you say the Oce 350 and 550 are crap. These units are probably 8 years old by now and probably weren’t maintained properly either by the end user or perhaps service not being performed regularly.

A customer of mine is just about to replace his Oce Arizona 250 GT with a newer model. This unit is 10 years old. All nozzles firing, and they produce high Quality POP work on it daily. All Arizona’s use a true variable dot from 6-42 picoliters, and like any other printers, in the right mode will produce top quality imagery.

I’ll put an Arizona image, up against any other flatbed...any day of the week. Give me a quality operator, quality image, same or equal ink combinations and the right print mode for the image...

Obviously some printers are faster, have different features, different price points, etc...but most of the time problems are preventable either through maintenance or regular service...too many operators cut corners or owners don’t want to pay for regular maintenance resulting in image problems. Usually as a printer ages problems occur...it’s to be expected with all brands...unless it’s a well maintained Arizona...

You hit the nail on the head. Its crazy how many people improperly maintain their flatbeds. Out of the 300 Flora Flatbeds I installed, only a few take care of their printers and the biggest problem is loosing the operator I trained. Second biggest problem, the owner is the operator and he spends too much time on the phone during training . Its very common for me to come to a repair and while I'm there the customer has me train his operator. I find the person pretty much is self taught and is damaging printheads daily. This results in poor print quality. Whatever printer you buy, do yourself a favor, have at least 3 people train to use it.
Filming training is useless because you know your not going to edit it...lol People learn at different speeds. When you are in school, someone is better at math than the other guy who is good at history. Same aplies for print training. If you have 3 people train, between the 3 of them you have the best chance of the least amount of mistakes, or forgotten tasks that need to be done to maintain it. Just some real world info. Also, if the guy training you spends 15 minutes showing you how to fold a lint free wipe, they guy doesn't know crap about your printer... Fluff... haha