I saw the new ones at a sign show. We are also long time Mimaki users. The one thing that grabbed me at the show was how immediately familiar the new 150 and 300 machines were to me. The same rock solid bullet proof media takeup and loading is very important to me. I've seen lots of thread on other brands not feeding straight or buckling, etc, not taking up right, needing to feed material all the wal down to the takeup and taping it on before even thinking about starting to print (or will have lots of problems), etc. Those things scare me off a little - I mean really, you need to waste 3 feet of material taping it to the takeup before printing on other brands??? No thanks.... Is the other brand machine pretty much 95% plastic? lol
Sure sure the print head in my JV33 costs 2 grand and takes 30 minutes to install.... I'm still running that same print head after 3 years though and it still prints perfect.
I do also want to like latex though. I really do. I know its the trendy thing and either latex or some other ink will be the future but solvent is far from dead. Not just Mimaki, other brands including brands under HP ownership are still releasing brand new models of solvent ink based machines. I think that says something.... I do doubt you will find much, if any feedback on the orange and green inks yet. Just have not been out long enough for much talk about them to surface. Of course just like with LcLm you machines speed will be cut in half if you are not running dual CMYK although you could go with the 300 machine which adds a second print head then run 8 color and have the same speed as the single head model or run the 300 as dual CMYK and have double the speed we enjoy with our old JV33 machines. I do also like the idea of orange and green ink colors though - the expanded gamut would be nice but at the same time I can say that it is very very rare that I have really even had any issues with color gamut running dual CMYK so I'm not convinced the expanded gamut will be a game changer.
Lot of choices for sure. As I mentioned, the Mimaki machines you will be able to start running almost immediately with almost nothing new to learn. They have updated the control panel though. Much nicer but still immediately familiar in almost all aspects. The idea of immediately dry is also very very interesting but I'm still just not sold on it yet. Some brands need to pre-coat media with some sort of chemical or something, they need to cook the material at stupidly hot temperatures (need dual 220v outlets! there goes your whole "green" argument if you are using more than double the energy, is it really any "greener"?).
