Get an Epson R5070 and ink costs will be as low as $0.15 - $0.13/ ml to print with. There's your low ink cost, works on fabric. Uses an optimizer base and water based resin inks for printing. No smells, half the price of a Colorado, and inks are likely as well. Buy 2 and double your speed vs 1 Colorado.
We print a stack of fabric on the Colorado - works great, really tough.
I suspect Squared has the tension bar in the "locked" position, needs to be unlocked so the bar can fall and pull on the fabric.
Regarding ink price, it's $240/litre (Australian), but it's not as relevant as how much it costs you in ink to print/clean/maintain over a year.
The Colorado makes ink usage is very simple to calculate.
In the menus it tells you how many m2 you've printed and how many 1 litre bottles you've put in it.
Printing all sorts of stuff over the last 3 years with lots of ink coverage, I've calculated it at 10,000m2 / 20,000m2 / and 30,000m2.
It's $1.68m2 (.18c/f2) in Australian dollars.
In US dollars that's about 13c/f2.
Very cheap.
We looked at the Epson Resin as a backup, it's certainly an improvement mechanically over the HP Latex.
The colours however are no improvement on latex (bit dull) and high quality printing is way slower than a Colorado, ink is easy to scratch and laminate doesn't stick that well to heavy ink coverage.
Epson's solvent printers are a better bet I think.
