Did I read somewhere you guys have a CET hybrid? Have you ever tried printing sign faces with it? I can't for the life of me decide whether we should go with the 5x10 true flatbed or get the hybrid which would allow us to do long faces and 100" rolled stock. That being said I'm not sure if printing long faces on a hybrid is realistic.
Yes, we have the hybrid. We actually have been printing a lot of translucent faces on it, that's a part of the reason we went with the hybrid, so we can run larger faces than the fixed bed can hold. We have one customer that we do a ton of tradeshow work for and probably once or twice a month we run several dozen 6'x6' translucent faces for a huge event backdrop setup they have.
We've tried printing both regular double-strike on one side, one print on one side of the material and a mirror image on the backside, and color/white/color on the face and they all look killer. Double-strike on the face is by far the easiest and fastest so that's what we normally do, and it looks excellent when lit or not.
We also got the hybrid because we do a ton of wallpaper, and UV is the way to go with it, much much better than solvent printing. We just finished a 30-roll wallpaper job and didn't have a single issue or scratch or mis-matched panel, when we were solvent printing it a job of that size would have meant having to reprint numerous panels because of scratching during install or "shading" from panel to panel, the UV printer has entirely eliminated that.
I will say I'm underwhelmed with it's ability to handle wider (98") roll stock. We've had limited success at best trying to run wide banner material, as it feeds it starts to buckle and bunch up pretty bad. I haven't had the time on inclination to try to get CET/Advantage out to try to address it yet because we don't run that many large banners anyway, but sooner or later we'll need to address it...
