Hi From Illinois, from a 3D Printing company looking at 2D Printers

[BuildParts]

Hi, I started lurking here a few days ago.

I began life in 2D printing 25+ years ago. I started a 3D Printing company in 1998 and run all major 3D technologies under one roof. Recently I decided it would be advantageous for us to have a full color wide format printer or flatbed entry level (20k-ish). As I started down the rabbit hole I went from looking at sub 10k printers for flat stuff, to now looking at Either a HP 700W/800W or Mimaki UCJV300-160 or UCJV300-130.

It would be used for very light production of in-house stickers for our packaging, Card stock postcards, promo flyers and inserts for our shipping/boxes, Banners for Trade Shows, Corp ID for our vehicles and windows, lastly and most justifiably, we produce a lot of prototype packaging, some of it needs labels (clear and tinted bottles) containers etc. I'm leaning more towards Mimaki due to metallic silver for labels and on board cutter, but Latex also sounds appealing now that it offers white. We wont use it often customer prototype labels, so idle time might be higher than what most users here experience.

This site has been great for my learning curve, any and all input is appreciated. Feel free to ask me about 3D printers, I am very experienced/educated in everything on that side of the printing world (I am very familiar with UV products and their nuances in 3D).

Cheers! Mike

 

[The Big Squeegee]

2 from OK

 

[MikePro]

HP & Mimaki are solid brands to pursue. While the HP would be the most user-friendly, I believe that your experience with 3D printing machines would make operating any solvent/UV/Latex fairly easy by comparison.

i think you've got a solid reason to pursue the metallic w/ onboard cutter option. white ink is cool, but expensive to simply have on-hand. ...although i'm DYING to get my hands on an 800W, but if i were merely printing labels then i'd stick with the waterfall printer.

 

[BuildParts]

User friendly is nice also, since we wont have a dedicated operator, mostly myself and my operations manager (he came from the t-shirt printing world and has extensive Illustrator experience). It will mostly be used for in house marketing materials... Stickers, posters, typical propaganda. Metallic inks seem nice, I believe the Roland has that also, but I haven't really seen anyone push Roland on this site as being better than Mimaki or HP... please correct me if I'm wrong about this though

 

[balstestrat]

Metallic is a gimmick and usually needs a lot of maintenance. Just saying.

 

[BuildParts]

Metallic is a gimmick and usually needs a lot of maintenance. Just saying.

Thanks, I have a call with BigSys scheduled today to hear their spiel on both systems (they resell both) so I can assume they are going to be pretty straight shooters. The reason I was leaning towards Mimaki is the built in cutter (I'm kinda shocked HP doesn't have one on board), but I am concerned that if we don't use it daily, which we wont, the UV inks will play havoc with the idle print heads.

So now I'm kinda leaning towards HP, but not sure how I feel about losing more real estate for a cutter... That said, do I have to laminate Latex or UV prints, if they are just cool stickers going on the outside of our shipping boxes? Also, the HP thread I saw you participating in, when white was first introduced in February looked promising, but it seems like new adopters are having quite a few issues. So are they equally unreliable systems for different reasons?

 

[balstestrat]

There may be many more reasons but originally it was obviously the heater on HP that made a cutter impossible.
Now they say it's more efficient to have a separate cutter, which is true. Printer prints and cutter cuts. Separate cutter is also more versatile and over all better.
One good thing on HP is that you can put it against a wall and you don't have to go behind it. On Mimaki you need to load it from the back.

Now after a year I feel like HP has fixed the biggest issues. I actually have very little issues with the machines on the field. Almost less than with old generation it feels like.

Only thing I say is forget 800, only consider 700.

There is so much stuff to talk about but almost all makes have their own things. Like Mimaki if I have understood correctly you have to throw away expired ink because the machine will refuse it after a month or so.

Anyway just try to understand the difference between ecosolvent, UV and Latex. You might find some things there that you maybe need or don't like. HP, Mimaki, Epson what ever after all solid machines and there's a ton of them out there that people use every day.

For that specific use case unlaminated should be fine for both UV and Latex.

 

[BuildParts]

HP is great for 'not every day' printing, I'm afraid the Mimaki would require too much maintenance with so much downtime, but I'm truly unfamiliar with Mimaki.
I have an HP, I run it daily sometimes, or once a week sometimes. It has held up well, color is consistent enough.
But really, who is the end customer here? In house marketing like stickers/posters are going to be a time sink compared to ordering from a wholesaler. Prototype packaging for an outside client vs yourself are very different concepts, HP would be great for your own prototypes, but you'd probably want something more like an Epson for outside clients due to color consistency (and mimaki may fit the bill too, never ran either but Epson seem to be the premium color machines).
If you're looking at printing cardboard box type prototypes, wouldn't a flatbed UV make more sense? Or even one of the direct color systems setups, which is almost a 2.5D printer, but those come with their own maintenance headaches. It does some neat stuff, cylinder attachments would print direct to bottle for you, layout a bunch of 3d printed objects to lay a graphic direct to them, lay a bunch of coasters out. It would not fit the bill for anything vehicular though (and in that regard I'd recommend finding a sign company to handle vehicles, building signage and banners, but that's coming from a sign maker...)

Great to hear about the HP being more flexible for usage. If I had an unlimited budget I would definitely do a large flatbed. Thats how I ended up on this site actually, trying to find the silver bullet that answers multiple problems. Right now I plan to start with Wide Format then possible buy the Roland LEF2- 200 or 300, to roll bottles. But those have height restrictions... Strange because in 3D printing the cheapest real estate is in the Z direction. These 2.5D printers are very limited in Z and really have no excuse to be that way.

 

[balstestrat]

It's just that it costs more and people don't need the massive extra height.

Like bottles, it's super slow to print those. There's way better machines for that, designed to do bottles, than UV flatbed.

 

[BuildParts]

There may be many more reasons but originally it was obviously the heater on HP that made a cutter impossible.
Now they say it's more efficient to have a separate cutter, which is true. Printer prints and cutter cuts. Separate cutter is also more versatile and over all better.
One good thing on HP is that you can put it against a wall and you don't have to go behind it. On Mimaki you need to load it from the back.

Now after a year I feel like HP has fixed the biggest issues. I actually have very little issues with the machines on the field. Almost less than with old generation it feels like.

Only thing I say is forget 800, only consider 700.

There is so much stuff to talk about but almost all makes have their own things. Like Mimaki if I have understood correctly you have to throw away expired ink because the machine will refuse it after a month or so.

Anyway just try to understand the difference between ecosolvent, UV and Latex. You might find some things there that you maybe need or don't like. HP, Mimaki, Epson what ever after all solid machines and there's a ton of them out there that people use every day.

For that specific use case unlaminated should be fine for both UV and Latex.

This is great info, the cutter can be used for vinyl cutting regular (unprinted sheets) for door logos and vehicle stickers also? Do you recommend HP or third party cutters?

Out of curiosity, why the 700w over the 800w? The 700w is what I was planning on if I went that route, but I like to be informed.

Yeah, the UV expiration exists in 3D also, it's partly true, but I work closely with a number of formulators and know for a fact formulation exists to give it longer life. We have Photopolymer resins that build just fine after expiration and the resin manufacturers are greedy and conservative on their expiration dates. We pay roughly $0.25 per gram for UV resins in our Jetted technologies... its insane how much waste they have to keep the jets purged and running properly... I can only assume this is the same with Mimaki (strike 2, I guess).

Thanks, Mike

 

[balstestrat]

HP cutter is Summa cutter. But I recommend Summa or Graphtec.

700 because you don't need the large 3L ink cartridges. Heater is also smaller and it's better for small jobs minimizing material waste. Other than that the two are almost identical.

 

[BuildParts]

HP cutter is Summa cutter. But I recommend Summa or Graphtec.

700 because you don't need the large 3L ink cartridges. Heater is also smaller and it's better for small jobs minimizing material waste. Other than that the two are almost identical.

Thanks for all your help, we're buying the 700W with the HP 64" cutter, sending PO in the morning. Hopefully it'll arrive in the next couple weeks (sounds like end of January though).

You may be able to help me with this or not, but I noticed its 220v, we run 208 3-phase, do I need a buck booster with the printer?

 

[P Wagner]

HP Latex 700/ 800 printers require single-phase 220v power (2), with a voltage range between 200-240. Be aware those are hard limits to the supported range, so anything outside of that range would require a buck boost transformer.

 

[BuildParts]

HP Latex 700/ 800 printers require single-phase 220v power (2), with a voltage range between 200-240. Be aware those are hard limits to the supported range, so anything outside of that range would require a buck boost transformer.

Yeah I agree, I have my electrician looking at the install guide to confirm. I have a few 230v machines that we have running with buck boost transformers and fortunately I have two extra ones we pulled off older machines, so hopefully that will do the trick. I was surprised to see this needs so much power, must be the heaters.

 

[balstestrat]

Thanks for all your help, we're buying the 700W with the HP 64" cutter, sending PO in the morning. Hopefully it'll arrive in the next couple weeks (sounds like end of January though).

You may be able to help me with this or not, but I noticed its 220v, we run 208 3-phase, do I need a buck booster with the printer?

Well that escalated quickly, enjoy your new toy!

I install every single machine to a 3-phase outlet. As input is 200-240 I imagine you could do just the same, running two cables between separate phases.
But anyways I would check what the electician thinks. And it's always good to check the balance between the phases in the building.

 

[bowtievega]

We have 208 volt in our shop and run the HP365 just fine at that voltage and have had zero issues.

 

[ProColorGraphics]

Yeah I agree, I have my electrician looking at the install guide to confirm. I have a few 230v machines that we have running with buck boost transformers and fortunately I have two extra ones we pulled off older machines, so hopefully that will do the trick. I was surprised to see this needs so much power, must be the heaters.

Just sent you a PM