Here we go again.. The true test for the LX850 year 2 .

[ForgeInc]

You seem to take issue with Vutek? Care to elaborate?

I kinda take issue with vutek. As much as they may be workhorses and have good speeds, their output quality leaves a lot to be desired in my opinion. I have highest quality samples off of them and our wimpy FB700 blows em outta the water quality wise.

That said we don't position ourselves on what our machines spit out, but rather by offering creative, high quality solutions. I have a feeling soon all the machines will have similar specs anyway.

The conversation about output speeds etc brings up something I have been thinking about a lot lately, and not to be a thread pirate but I wonder for bigger shops if it is better to have one or two ultra fast, knock stuff out kinda printers like durst or similar spec'ed machine...or 4-5 lower speed, higher quality machines that you might be able to get for the same price?

Our reseller mentioned he has a customer that has like 5 or so HP fb700 machines. If you have the room, this idea kinda makes sense to me. if one goes down you have redundancy, you can have some with white some without, run different jobs all at same time or combine them for huge jobs. Then their is a local printer who relies heavily on an HP7500. Yeah it's a monster...but if the thing goes down for a few days or more...or isn't running right, you can easily be screwed.

I dunno the answer...just something I been pondering.

Back to the thread....Merritt - Curious if you would consider the Latex a good purchase for you all in all? I mean, if you got one season of that job off that machine...seems like it done it's job? I mean, you MUST be able to pay for just about any machine you'd want to run that one job. Anything else is gravy.

 

[National Sign Co. - Print]

I kinda take issue with vutek. As much as they may be workhorses and have good speeds, their output quality leaves a lot to be desired in my opinion. I have highest quality samples off of them and our wimpy FB700 blows em outta the water quality wise.

That said we don't position ourselves on what our machines spit out, but rather by offering creative, high quality solutions. I have a feeling soon all the machines will have similar specs anyway.

The conversation about output speeds etc brings up something I have been thinking about a lot lately, and not to be a thread pirate but I wonder for bigger shops if it is better to have one or two ultra fast, knock stuff out kinda printers like durst or similar spec'ed machine...or 4-5 lower speed, higher quality machines that you might be able to get for the same price?

Our reseller mentioned he has a customer that has like 5 or so HP fb700 machines. If you have the room, this idea kinda makes sense to me. if one goes down you have redundancy, you can have some with white some without, run different jobs all at same time or combine them for huge jobs. Then their is a local printer who relies heavily on an HP7500. Yeah it's a monster...but if the thing goes down for a few days or more...or isn't running right, you can easily be screwed.

I dunno the answer...just something I been pondering.

Back to the thread....Merritt - Curious if you would consider the Latex a good purchase for you all in all? I mean, if you got one season of that job off that machine...seems like it done it's job? I mean, you MUST be able to pay for just about any machine you'd want to run that one job. Anything else is gravy.

I have no issues with the LX as a medium volume super high quality.
I just never thought I would need to have 3 of them to keep a single job on point.

They have replaced our Lightjet for backlits. Which is a plus and when this project is complete they will run many other projects. 24/7/365 work horses they are not even close...

It's just our first LX has a hair over 2 million s/f printed on it and it is now breaking down every other day. I say the machine is past its Lifespan in miles and HP will not admit it. It is a 700,000 s/f max machine.

If they told me upfront the machine would only last a certain amount of production and then be unreliable I would of been cool with that. Even the fact they still are trying to convince me different.

We have stuff break they have never even expected to fail.

 

[rjssigns]

Makes me wonder how solid the HP L's are. Or any of their equipment. Although our sub has 2 5m Scitex and he loves them. If one were to truly run the wee out of it day in/day out like Merritt what would happen? Are all the L25500 and 26500 etc...going to eventually have recurring failures?
Maybe they should be looked at as the Bic lighter of printing.

 

[National Sign Co. - Print]

Makes me wonder how solid the HP L's are. Or any of their equipment. Although our sub has 2 5m Scitex and he loves them. If one were to truly run the wee out of it day in/day out like Merritt what would happen? Are all the L25500 and 26500 etc...going to eventually have recurring failures?
Maybe they should be looked at as the Bic lighter of printing.

We have 2 Scitex XL 1500's and they have never ever let us down in the 5 years we have had them. No new HP's should carry the Scitex badge. They are far from the Israeli True Scitex engineered production presses.

We have had more techs here for one Lx in 16 months of owning than our 9 other production machines combined whom are between 3-5 years old.

HP= "Heap of plastic","Have patience" or "Hardly Production" take your pick....

 

[WYLDGFI]

I have no issues with the LX as a medium volume super high quality.
I just never thought I would need to have 3 of them to keep a single job on point.

They have replaced our Lightjet for backlits. Which is a plus and when this project is complete they will run many other projects. 24/7/365 work horses they are not even close...

It's just our first LX has a hair over 2 million s/f printed on it and it is now breaking down every other day. I say the machine is past its Lifespan in miles and HP will not admit it. It is a 700,000 s/f max machine.

If they told me upfront the machine would only last a certain amount of production and then be unreliable I would of been cool with that. Even the fact they still are trying to convince me different.

We have stuff break they have never even expected to fail.

Im wondering then If I should just stick with the Vutek I was thinking of. Shoot....3k sq ft a month on one machine isnt a lot at all. According to your figure there thats less than the average 5 year note.
I agree that Vutek gouges the HELL out of us on service and parts...it sucks in that respect. But damn...I have a 6+ yo 3360 that still cranking out nice stuff.

 

[National Sign Co. - Print]

Im wondering then If I should just stick with the Vutek I was thinking of. Shoot....3k sq ft a month on one machine isnt a lot at all. According to your figure there thats less than the average 5 year note.
I agree that Vutek gouges the HELL out of us on service and parts...it sucks in that respect. But damn...I have a 6+ yo 3360 that still cranking out nice stuff.

3K s/f a month is only 180,000 s/f per 5 years

My figure is about 11,600 per month for 60 months = 700,000 s/f max and the machine rolls downhill very quickly.

 

[WYLDGFI]

whoops...Bad math on my part then! Yes though....11,600 monthly. thats still a good chunk of printing....lately we've been doing quite a bit more than normal. Still upcoming job is 3k sq of 3m for example....single job over a 2 day period for us. Adding it up...700K for a lifespan doesnt seem to make a lot of sense......really weak actually.

 

[ForgeInc]

Hmmm..I guess it's all relative to a ROI. I look at the fact that one LX machine did your entire job last year and say...one qurater or half of it this year? Your job last year was over a million sf wasn't it?

Not sure how much the scitex machines you have were, but I bet it was way more than 150-180k or however much new LX 850's cost. Again, if one machine did the job last year, I would say that's a pretty solid purchase and I am nearly positive you could factor in the price of a brand new machine or maybe even 2 every time you run this job, basically getting the new machine(s) for free in a sense.

 

[ForgeInc]

Wanted to add...I hear ya about HP service. We went through some nightmares...but in the end I feel they took care of us.

 

[GAC05]

...but in the end I feel they took care of us.

Which end?

 

[National Sign Co. - Print]

Hmmm..I guess it's all relative to a ROI. I look at the fact that one LX machine did your entire job last year and say...one qurater or half of it this year? Your job last year was over a million sf wasn't it?

Not sure how much the scitex machines you have were, but I bet it was way more than 150-180k or however much new LX 850's cost. Again, if one machine did the job last year, I would say that's a pretty solid purchase and I am nearly positive you could factor in the price of a brand new machine or maybe even 2 every time you run this job, basically getting the new machine(s) for free in a sense.

please do not try and analyze any roi, throughput, machine usage or overall production comparison. to our production model here

the overall nuts sand bolts are not fair game .. this is an extreme project with extreme expectations and 7 years running so we will always react to clients expectations. many years on many different production machines..


only fair also to share real world production goods and bads with current day technology.... who knows what the bar is next....

I am hoping at least a hemp based tech....

 

[ForgeInc]

Wasn't trying to over analyze...agreed, your model is way a different game than most and you know it better than anyone. I guess I was just pointing out that a 180 k machine putting out over 1million sf non-stop 24/7 months on end is a pretty good purchase in my humble opinion, that's all!

 

[National Sign Co. - Print]

Wasn't trying to over analyze...agreed, your model is way a different game than most and you know it better than anyone. I guess I was just pointing out that a 180 k machine putting out over 1million sf non-stop 24/7 months on end is a pretty good purchase in my humble opinion, that's all!

sorry bro now way trying to think I had issue with your 2 cents.

would agree machines on paper do not owe a dime..
it is the expectation plus or minus.. that has been established by mfg..

if your or I made false or empty promises or expectations to our clients they would hold us accountable.

especially if now all you have are hassles and had to buy back ups( lx 850& 600)to fill void ...

 

[cdiesel]

Our FB950 runs more consistently and dependably than our 800. Don't get me wrong, I am still happy with the 800 overall (I don't see any other 10' machines out there with the print quality of the 800's), but it's definitely a quirky machine. We get errors daily on ours for little stupid things, but each one requires a shutdown, which takes 20 minutes..

I was once told by a reliable source that HP built the L25500 to be a 3 year machine. I'm wondering if they took the same approach with the 800/600's...

 

[rjssigns]

HP the Bic lighter of printing. Nice.

I agree with Merritt. I don't give a fiddly-f**k about all the fancy accounting. When I buy a piece of equipment it better crank out product period, until I decide to replace it. Not have to replace it because it can't do the job it was intended to do.

 

[Helder Pimenta]

The GS vs QS debate is a JOKE. Major improvement in print quality.

Additionally, they are introducing a completely new machine that is supposed to "revolutionary" at Drupa.

I agree 100%, the GS series has more quality and the density of the inks is a mind blowing diference for the better.
Don't know now, but when we changed out QS2000 > GS3200 the RIP was (Fiery XF - 4.1), VERY SLOW and its has lots of tools but... the final output limits the ink density too much. I've only worked with that RIP one week and changed it do Caldera (beta driver for the GS3200 at the time) much better density.

 

[jens]

for example :
xl600 bought 9 sept 2010

Total printed substrate: 39916.80 m² / 429660.4 ft² /today
Total ink used: Cyan = 49.2 l Magenta = 75.8 Yellow = 151.0 Light cyan = 57.1 Light magenta = 54.4 Matte black = 61.0

Slot 1 Magenta-Yellow CC582A 12
Slot 2 Light cyan-Light magenta CC584A 8
Slot 3 Matte black-Cyan CC583A 8

Printing time (h) 1541 Power on time (h) 12061

lx600 2 bought on dec 2011
ubstrate usage 345,435.88 ft²
Substrate usage 32,092.07 m²

Cyan 43551 ml
Magenta 56434 ml
Yellow 107948 ml
Light cyan 34692 ml
Light magenta 38618 ml
Matte black 61570 ml

 

[National Sign Co. - Print]

DONE!!!!

1,087,321 s/f

54 tech visits

4 line filters, 2 full encoder rebuilds, replaced entire platen, 100+ fuses, 2 servo motors, 2 new sets of dual cores, replaced capping assembly twice plus so much more I forgot about.

She limped for a hot minute thank god for backup LX. She did make it..

We start it all over again in November... That should be even more interesting..

 

[HulkSmash]

DONE!!!!

1,087,321 s/f

54 tech visits

4 line filters, 2 full encoder rebuilds, replaced entire platen, 100+ fuses, 2 servo motors, 2 new sets of dual cores, replaced capping assembly twice plus so much more I forgot about.

She limped for a hot minute thank god for backup LX. She did make it..

We start it all over again in November... That should be even more interesting..

just sell me that one, and get yourself a new one.

congrats on getting it done.... 54 tech visits.. fun

 

[Jack Knight1979]

I'll take that used up one off your hands for a couple grand. I'll even come pick it up.