Need Help Deciding on a Flatbed, Intermittent Use

[A.C.M.aker]

Hello yall, I've been doing research on getting a uv-flatbed for our company for a few weeks now and finally felt it better to ask some people with some real know-how instead. We've been looking into bring printing in-house as we're first, the only ones in our field still outsourcing and second, really need to be able to control the quality. With that out of the way let me list some of the complications I've been having trying to settle on a model. Honestly a lot of the stuff I was looking at i.e. the Compress 1200 and the Roland 640-ft but from looking at peoples experiences in hear I felt it best to field it to you all instead.

• We need wide printing range, literally postcard to ideally 4'x4'
• It will be running anywhere from once a week to everyday when we have projects
• Needs white ink, and likely white ink circulation to help deal with the downtime??
• Primary substrates would be acrylic and wood, but we get a lot of unusual request so wider ink type compatibility would be great
• Print height of at least 1.5", ideally 2" or more
• While this goes without saying, we need solid support and training, this is our companies first professional printer, and while I have background in adjacent work we'll still be asking a million questions

Thanks a million yall, I know this is probably a big one, but I've been sifting through jargon, reviews, and print sites for weeks so any help at all is appreciated. I'm not looking for the perfect flatbed, just one I'm not going to regret for months

 

[BigfishDM]

I would NOT buy a machine yet! What is your budget for it? It's not just the machine you will be investing in.

 

[Gino]

Having a white option which won't be used on a regular basis, could present a problem in most machines. Since you are the only one, not doing it, what are your other museums using ??

 

[A.C.M.aker]

Absolutely, Bigfish, I've been trying to pin down what the overhead in material and maintenance might be, but lets say around 100k. I can't say more, but we spend more than that outsourcing each year.

Gino, were not a museum, we just often get work from them. Our competitors don't quite share that information, or I would have gone with that. I will say that daily maintenance isn't out of the question for the white ink, it's too frequently needed to forgo it.

 

[BigfishDM]

Absolutely, Bigfish, I've been trying to pin down what the overhead in material and maintenance might be, but lets say around 100k. I can't say more than that on outsourcing every year.

Gino, were not a museum, we just often get work from them. Our competitors don't quite share that information, or I would have gone with that. I will say that daily maintenance isn't out of the question for the white ink, it's too frequently needed to forgo it.

Ok, if you want to reach out to me I can show you what would be involved to do what you want to do. Does that $100k budget include an employee?

 

[A.C.M.aker]

Edit to my last post: *I can't say more, but we spend more than that outsourcing each year.

Sure, that sounds fine! The budget doesn't include an employee and is really just the upfront cost for a fully kitted printer (I assume both installation and delivery will be at least 20 to 40 k).

 

[johnnysigns]

I'd get in touch with Vanguard/Bruce Mello.

 

[FloraUSA]

FloraUSA has a full line of UV printers that will fit your requirements. We have true flatbeds and hybrid models, right now we also have two refurbished 4'x8' flatbed units available for sale as well. All of our true flatbed printers can print up to 3.9" thick. The hybrid models can print up to 2" thick. All of our UV printers can be configured with white inks as well.

Based on your need to print on small material and wood I would recommend getting a true flatbed. It is much easier to align material on a true flatbed than it is on a hybrid printer plus the vacuum on the flatbed is better for wood. We offer onsite installation and training and also provide onsite warranty repairs if required. We can definitely get you in the price range you are looking for while still giving you the option of adding more print heads later to increase speed if your business picks up.

We are located in northern NJ about 2.5 hours from Philadelphia. We can arrange to have a demo done on our printers with your files and material and you can see how easy it is to use for yourself.

 

[Superior_Adam]

I would suggest the Mimaki JFX200. We had one for 5 years and it was a great machine for a starter. When we got our new EFI flatbed to increase our production the JFX200 would sit for over a week. I could start it up and everything would be fine and ready to print on the nozzle check. If we had the space I would have just added 2-3 more of them. In 5 years we had 1 tech visit for the machine being down. It is a slower printer but for the $70k range it is a great printer.

 

[axelmk]

Take a look at the Latex r1000 from HP
Budget would be higher, more like 150K but the quality is amazing. No banding, small type is No problem
The Opacity of the white ink is excellent, We've had it for 9 months and we LOVE it.
Let me know if you have any questions or if you want us to print you a small sample.

 

[A.C.M.aker]

I'd get in touch with Vanguard/Bruce Mello.

Do you have experience with the vr5d? I know that it has ricoh heads and but not quite what that would mean for the output.

We're fufilling contract work so speed isn't the greatest issue, but viewing distance can be pretty close 1-2feet and I don't see any information in terms of it's pl, or its dpi settings, do you know?? (Heard the customer service was great though, and thats almost more important haha)

FloraUSA has a full line of UV printers that will fit your requirements. We have true flatbeds and hybrid models, right now we also have two refurbished 4'x8' flatbed units available for sale as well. All of our true flatbed printers can print up to 3.9" thick. The hybrid models can print up to 2" thick. All of our UV printers can be configured with white inks as well.

Based on your need to print on small material and wood I would recommend getting a true flatbed. It is much easier to align material on a true flatbed than it is on a hybrid printer plus the vacuum on the flatbed is better for wood. We offer onsite installation and training and also provide onsite warranty repairs if required. We can definitely get you in the price range you are looking for while still giving you the option of adding more print heads later to increase speed if your business picks up.

We are located in northern NJ about 2.5 hours from Philadelphia. We can arrange to have a demo done on our printers with your files and material and you can see how easy it is to use for yourself.

Yeah hybrids have been off the table for a while even if they would cut the cost a good deal. I know that flora is Chinese manufactured brand, CET correct? For the average costumer whats the cost of maintenance been and do the printer support more than one ink type (for substrates not color/hue/etc)? With more parts and especially swappable ones

I would suggest the Mimaki JFX200. We had one for 5 years and it was a great machine for a starter. When we got our new EFI flatbed to increase our production the JFX200 would sit for over a week. I could start it up and everything would be fine and ready to print on the nozzle check. If we had the space I would have just added 2-3 more of them. In 5 years we had 1 tech visit for the machine being down. It is a slower printer but for the $70k range it is a great printer.

How is the white on acrylic? The company we worked with has constant issues with fisheye and banding when we need it printed on transparent acrylic for back-lighting and other products. I know that fisheye-ing can get caused by static right? But yeah as I said above speed is not a concern, mostly because graphics or displays are usually part of a larger project and not the totality. But that aside, what did you have to call out the tech for?


And axelmk thank you for the suggestion, but from my research latex ink doesn't afford the variety of substrates we would need to work with due to the heating. I'm also skeptical of it's durability if it was exposed to the elements long term or high levels of human contact. It doesn't help that 150k is a hard sell on top of all that, sorry.

Also thank you all for you're replies! This is all very helpful for me haha

Edited for additional info

 

[FloraUSA]

A.C.M.aker Flora is a large manufacturer of printers for OEM printer manufacturers, they have almost 600 employees world wide. CET isn't made by Flora, CET uses Handtop printers.

The current generation Flora printers use either the Konica 1024i or the Ricoh Gen5 print heads. The Konica print head gives better image quality as the drop size is slightly smaller and the Konica based printers are able to print faster than the Ricoh ones. The Ricoh and Konica print heads are available in the PP Series (Halogen Lamp Units) and the Konica is available in the Xtra Series (LED Cure Units). The printers are not designed to have multiple inks that are easily swappable, I am not sure any printer on the market is. Our inks have great adhesion and color gamut on a wide range of materials, we can provide samples for you to test as well. Maintenance cost on the unit are low, there are ink filters and greasing that needs to be done a couple of times a year. The printers come with a full 1 year onsite warranty and we also offer preventative maintenance visits that can be purchased in addition to the warranty.

We have references from customers who we have sold printers to and customers who purchased from the previous master distributor and we went and serviced their units available for review on our website, the link is https://www.florausa.net/customer-testimonials/.

 

[A.C.M.aker]

Thank you very much! I think I got mixed up with another company then, sorry about that!

As for the ink, I'm not looking to hotswap different inks, and understand that changing inks requires flushing, cleaning, etc. What I'm trying to say is are there more than one set of inks sold and compatible with the Flora line. For example I know that the Mimaki series suggested by Superior_Adam had two lines of inks for their flatbed, one that is more flexible and one for high resistance. I feel it's important that if we run into any issues in the future with different substrates and adhesion or wear that having more options is a plus.

I hope that clarifies things, but yes we'll keep you in mind, you're location certainly would be a big plus given this will be our first flatbed!

 

[FloraUSA]

Thank you very much! I think I got mixed up with another company then, sorry about that!

As for the ink, I'm not looking to hotswap different inks, and understand that changing inks requires flushing, cleaning, etc. What I'm trying to say is are there more than one set of inks sold and compatible with the Flora line. For example I know that the Mimaki series suggested by Superior_Adam had two lines of inks for their flatbed, one that is more flexible and one for high resistance. I feel it's important that if we run into any issues in the future with different substrates and adhesion or wear that having more options is a plus.

I hope that clarifies things, but yes we'll keep you in mind, you're location certainly would be a big plus given this will be our first flatbed!

Ok now I understand, we have 1 primary ink type for each of our printer series, our 1000 series is for the PP series and our 2001 series is for the Xtra series, neither of these inks are from Flora themselves. We also have access to Flora's inks if required. The ink supplier we work with can and has made custom inks for us in the past, if we ever run into an issue with adhesion on material that can be corrected. With that said making custom inks isn't a quick process, in my experience at minimum you are looking at 2 to 3 months before you would have a working product. The ink supplier actually just made us a small batch of Orange, Red, and Violet for a customer so they could hit colors required for their clients. The feed back from our customer base has been overwhelmingly positive as compared to the inks that they were using from the previous master distributor. They are very flexible and I haven't heard of any adhesion issues with any of the standard materials out there.

As long as the inks are compatible then all you have to do is empty the tanks, drain the lines, ink the printer back up, and change the filters and potentially the icc profiles. All the inks from our ink supplier are compatible with each other so there wouldn't be any reactions that you would have to worry about if you were to switch from our standard inks to a custom set.

Let me know if I can help any further.

Chris

 

[Megagrafix]

Hello yall, I've been doing research on getting a uv-flatbed for our company for a few weeks now and finally felt it better to ask some people with some real know-how instead. We've been looking into bring printing in-house as we're first, the only ones in our field still outsourcing and second, really need to be able to control the quality. With that out of the way let me list some of the complications I've been having trying to settle on a model. Honestly a lot of the stuff I was looking at i.e. the Compress 1200 and the Roland 640-ft but from looking at peoples experiences in hear I felt it best to field it to you all instead.

• We need wide printing range, literally postcard to ideally 4'x4'
• It will be running anywhere from once a week to everyday when we have projects
• Needs white ink, and likely white ink circulation to help deal with the downtime??
• Primary substrates would be acrylic and wood, but we get a lot of unusual request so wider ink type compatibility would be great
• Print height of at least 1.5", ideally 2" or more
• While this goes without saying, we need solid support and training, this is our companies first professional printer, and while I have background in adjacent work we'll still be asking a million questions

Thanks a million yall, I know this is probably a big one, but I've been sifting through jargon, reviews, and print sites for weeks so any help at all is appreciated. I'm not looking for the perfect flatbed, just one I'm not going to regret for months

Have you considered used I have a used Agfa in a porno 60 inches wide the hybrid French white and maintains white ones well easy low-cost way to get up and running and learn what you need to know about plumbing flap that. You can help and instruct and advise. The price is $5000 and you move it’s on casters just has to be tracked carefully no major shutting it down then you have to have asked for two men

 

[Megagrafix]

Have you considered used. I have a used Agfa AnapurnaMW 60 inches wide and does everything you want. $5000 with $2300 worth of ink/supplies included. Runs very well. Bob.

 

[TrustMoore_TN]

Agfa in a porno

i know it's a typo for Anapurna.. just took me a sec to realize it after I got a good laugh!