Yes! Told you. Im spending the day with one friday. Its an impala with 2x cmyk + white, still havent judge this printer without the lights. I also still need to judge how much time you lose been a true flat bed vs a belt printer for feeding tables. Did you try that?
The difference between 6 colour and 4 colour is negligible. I guess if you are coming from an offset background and trying to achieve that same quality then the lights make a difference in gradients and skin tones. If I was to show my customers a 4 colour versus a 6 colour I doubt they could tell which one is which, not with the naked eye any ways. Sacrificing the light inks and having double the speed is more appealing to us. You're approaching speeds closer to the FB10000 albeit it in 4 colour mode but with no artefacts like banding or lines etc.
If you are using tandem mode so smaller sheets you don't loose any time. You will probably need to wear your gym gear to keep up with the machine in faster modes.
For full sheets where you can only load one sheet at a time you loose about 10-15 seconds unloading and reloading. They have pins to align the sheet to which you can move around. The belt system on say a Durst would be more efficient in that you can load the next sheet while the current one is printing so the operator has more of a gap where they aren't causing the machine downtime. Like Forge said previously on the HP even though this still works the same it still takes 10-15 seconds for the printer to load the next sheet and to start printing.
Also lamp warm up is 1 minute. This is 5 minutes on our current FB700. Procedure with starting the machine is manual wipe of the heads. Purge and then test print if its all good then start printing.
End of the day wipe heads with flush fluid, purge, replace the spit paper consumable and power down the machine.
Would take a few minutes to do each of those processes.
9 Picolitre mode is insane. 2 pt text you'd think it was offset quality. This is their fine art mode. In 2 x CMYK its 20 square metres an hour. Nearly double that if you're going 4 x CMYK. Crazy stuff in terms of speed for that quality.
You can always do cool stuff like 5 layer printing so CMYK -> White -> Black -> White -> CMYK for double sided applications all in one pass.
The roll to roll system looks really good as well.
The solid colours you are correct too. At speed mode they are acceptable. They aren't perfect but if you are selling this mode its for applications where you say you'd look at them from one metre. In production and quality mode its perfect. They actually have a lot more modes that aren't in their brochure and the system works as a resolution and number of passes. Resolution will be fixed for the job but increasing the number of passes helps eliminate things like banding etc. So its a balancing act in terms of that. They should have a chart available for you when you do your demo.
These are all things I experienced and ran myself. These weren't just samples they had prepared earlier. We took our own files which we thought were problematic for our current setup or we had to reduce the print mode to get what we deem acceptable.
This machine in 4 x CYMK at minimum is four times faster then our current setup with a much better quality.
For the price point we are being offered versus the output and quality I don't see other machines stacking up against this machine. Even if you go to the Durst you loose a bit of width and have a greater initial investment.
Hope that helps you. Share your experience when you have you demo as well.
