We have a FluidColor R84F Turbo - 4x8 with Ricoh Gen 6 heads and CMYKW. Love the Gen 6 heads: fast, reliable, great print quality. The folks at FluidColor have been great and they even had a training in Kentucky that we sent a guy to. These guys started out reconditioning Flatbed UV printers and have beefed up somethings on their printers with that experience in mind. A few tips, if you get white you need to print every day and never fill the primary tank up. White ink is made from titanium and if it sits the heavy bits drop to the bottom... so print every day and change out the old ink about once every six to nine months (unless you use a good bit), otherwise it will start to yellow. Next bit of advice, don't run a filter in your chiller. Because of the LED lamps, the unit uses liquid cooling and has a chiller to process the heat. We had a filter break up, clogging the filter and thus preventing the cooling, heating the lines up and a ink leak from this. Not much fun to clean up or fix. We removed the filter and were able to get the broken bits out and now flows like new. You change out the water every six months and there is a flushing process anyway, so just say no to the filter. You will need two 240v outlets and you may need to have them tested for voltage, so possible hidden expense. But likely you have an electrician customer, so he will be glad for a bit of your business. Outside of that, there is a process to follow when the unit will not be used over a weekend, another for long weekends, and a third for storage. If you follow those, I would not expect any problem. As far as the machine, we love ours and it is a workhorse. We use Flexi for design and Onyx for RIP software. You can use leading lamps to get a gloss print, and trailing lamps to get a matte with high detail (you can laminate the matte with glossy lam and you are back to gloss). If you are printing heavy ink with a white base or overcoat you can use both leading and trailing lamps (as long as your filter does not clog up...). Since our dock was not the right height for the box truck that delivered, we hired the tow truck neighbor and he used a rollback to unload and then lower to roll off into our building. These will not go through a 3 foot doorway! Considerations like power and delivery will be common to many printer brands, so tips regardless of which brand you choose. Last, we choose one row of heads and have no regrets with that.
