I have about 25 years of experience in this industry including being the third company ever buying the first model Latex printer. After that, I have worked for the world's largest, independent profiling and testing lab and can personally operate over 40 printer models.
While working as sign maker and buying the HP Latex L65500, we had quite some "challenges" with this new technology and took HP quite some months to get it right. We had some big jobs heavily depending upon our printer and we had to buy another printer to fix the gap left by the Latex printer. We bought a Seiko H2 74S and this machine printed about 380,000 sq/ft in less than 2 years. I always felt their ink was slightly more "aggressive" to accommodate the higher printing speeds this machine had over every competitor back then in that segment. This meant that if you did NOT do your daily maintenance once or twice a day, the machine would easily get clogged nozzles. Which makes perfect sense with this volume, right?
So this machine LOVED to print a lot and as long as I maintained it well (including maintenance like changing cap heads, wiper blades and spitting pads) it never gave me any issues.
Today they have a broader range of inks and the slightly more aggressive inks seem to lose market due to the "green" issues they usually bring. So today they might have inks as well that are slightly more forgiving.
In my opinion, only buy a solvent-based machine if you are printing every day and if you are willing to treat them well. If you do both, they will last very long and should not cause too many issues.
