Chinese Kingjet Eco-solvent Epson i3200 head - $2500 Calibrate? VS ICC profile (Dither Dilemma)

[Swanedog]

I work in a shop with a variety of large format digital printers ranging from Mimaki to Roland to a couple from China (Kingjet and Locor).

For my customers creating custom ICC profiles has never been a necessity so while I have a lot of experience using digital printers, I have none with ICC profile creation.

Our Kingjet prints very consistent and fast, but the product I use it for I would really like to dial up the quality and am ok with sacrificing speed. I see that the manufacture only calibrated the profile to utilize the lowest quality dither pattern in Flexi (i guess they only cared about fast printing). I can't select another dither pattern without Flexi telling me that the profile does not include that dither.

My dilemma is that when I approach custom ICC profilers, they tell me my issue can't be resolved with just simply creating a new ICC profile but that I need to get a calibration done. I've received a quote from a third party company that said they can come recalibrate the printer for a different dither pattern and will profile one media type but want to charge $2500!

I have some sticker shock from the quote as that's more than half of what I paid for the printer.

Kingjet seems unable or unwilling to create a higher quality profile even when offering to pay them. My Locor (same internal components as Kingjet) prints with a higher quality dither and looks great.

Am I stuck having to pay $2500? Are there other options I may not be aware of?

Thanks,
Michael

 

[White Haus]

I'm not familiar with cheap Chinese printers, but the other option would be for you to buy a spectrophotometer, learn to use it, and create profiles and run calibrations yourself.

This would cost more than $2500 and would take significantly more time, but you would then have the luxury of being able to use this knowledge/equipment on your other printers, potentially creating a more color-calibrated environment.

(Insert give a man a fish vs teach him to fish quote here)

 

[Pauly]

Well, yes. Getting a pro to profile your printer with a range of stock isn't cheap.

I dont know much about flexi, but im sure you can search youtube for some tutorials. You'll get the idea on what needs to be done.

 

[cornholio]

2500.- sounds like one work day around here. During this time, it should be possible to create 4-6 printmode/media combinations. This depends of course on the printers functions... (a UV printer is more forgiving in terms of ink limit, than a ecosol or sublimation.)
In my experience, defining a optimal ink limit and print mode for a certain medium is the biggest challenge. Linearization an profiling is done rather quickly.
I was called for profiling more than once on printers, where lots of nozzles were missing and/or deflected. That's just wasted time.

 

[poligrafika]

Buy from ebay second hand densitometer for around 400-500 usd. And in Flexy is easy to make custom profile.on Flexy cloud site you can download a lot of icc profile, but from my experience on my Mutoh and HP latex, custom ICC profile give best result.And charging 2500 usd for making profile sound to much.does that guy think that is servising Boing planes?