Had a customer come in and place an order for 24 sets of 12" x 24" magnetic full color. I went to order in the magnetic and print 3651 as usual and apply but I was wondering your opinions on the printable magnetic.
It would be nice to print directly and just trim instead of printing vinyl and them having to apply. Being I've never used it before though I was wondering if any of you have and how it worked let alone how it will go through my Mimaki.
thanks
Tried printable magnetic media once. It's one of those things that sounds good but doesn't work out quite as well as it sounds.
Thickness of the media was not a problem, neither was its magnetic properties. The entire feed path on my printer(s) is either plastic, aluminum, or stainless. There's nothing with any magnetic properties in the path of the media. Moreover, the magnetic field of the media is very weak and affects nothing.
The biggest problem is that the media is incredibly heavy. It's difficult to load it into the printer but the biggest problem is that the weight affects the printer's media feed mechanism. It simply wasn't designed to accurately feed anything this heavy. You end up with prints that run at least 10% short because the printer cannot move the magnetic media properly. It's really hard to compensate for a loss of 1" in 10". In other words, a print that's supposed to be 10" long would be only 9".
It's far easier and just as fast to print on vinyl and apply to the magnetic media than to have to deal with the problems of trying to print directly onto it.
