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Suggestions Time to update, Latex or Solvent?

Yeahgor

Born to be The Designer.
Its a water-based ink, From what I've seen its Latex on steroids with no heat and much much better gamut. We are trying to get a live demo to evaluate dumping our 570s

Sounds nice. However you did the Car Wrap on it? How it works with starching under Lamination? And do you think the printing speed on Hawk possible to compare with HP570?
 

Christian @ 2CT Media

Active Member
Sounds nice. However you did the Car Wrap on it? How it works with starching under Lamination? And do you think the printing speed on Hawk possible to compare with HP570?
Print speed on paper are similar to Latex for 10 pass equivalent, The ink has better stretchability than latex from the samples I have but we have yet to wrap anything with it which is why we want to do a live demo.
 

TomK

New Member
Print speed on paper are similar to Latex for 10 pass equivalent, The ink has better stretchability than latex from the samples I have but we have yet to wrap anything with it which is why we want to do a live demo.
The Stratojet dude ignored my reply about price and serviceability, let me know how your samples turn out.
 

balstestrat

Problem Solver
Print speed on paper are similar to Latex for 10 pass equivalent, The ink has better stretchability than latex from the samples I have but we have yet to wrap anything with it which is why we want to do a live demo.
...Nevermind I derped and misunderstood you there for a second...
 
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ikarasu

Active Member
I don't know what the big deal is about cleaning an eco-solvent printer. I hit mine every few weeks if even that. Maybe I'm doing it wrong but 2-3 mins tops? Hit the wiper, captop and bottom of the carriage, such an ordeal. Its more effort to dust the thing off. Change caps once a year, 5 mins.
The heads are not expensive relatively speaking. Older pair of DX4s 1200, if they go 4 years that's $1 per working day. Say a DX7 is about 3k? 4 years its $3/day, dual heads $6/day. If you're using the machine, that shouldn't hurt you. Unless you're running the snot out of them, I'd expect them to go longer than 4 years. It's strange how people's thinking goes but HP figured it out. People don't add up cumulative spending and only focus on the right now price.

Every machine is different. We had a seiko h274s... It was a beast and fast. Every day we had to do maintenance though... It involved using a roller and cleaning the cap tops daily. It took maybe 10 minutes... However the roller was $1 each... The solvent $80 a bottle, and that was just the daily! Every 2 weeks we had to do a head soak with a special sheet. Each sheet was $10... And you had to soak it.in fluid that was again $80 a bottle. We calculated it was roughly $70 a month in materials, let alone time in cleaning.

So going from that to a latex... That alone was one of the biggest advantages to us. Ontop of having 6 heads fail at once, and them wanting $30,000 to replace them... It just made sense to buy a latex for cheaper than it'd cost to repair the seiko.


We've spent maybe 2 grand on heads over the 2 years we had our printer. So long as it continues this way for 28 more years.. We're ahead!

I'd never buy another seiko. They made me hate solvents. But I've heard great things about Epson, and if likely buy an Epson over an hp if I had to redo it all over again.
 

Boudica

Back to "educational purposes"
I thought the name Latex implied an oil base. I don't have a latex printer - I know nothing about them, other than they get really hot. - so this thread is fascinating :)
 
All inks offered for sale are required to make available an MDS (used to be called MSDS) document which discloses the ingredients and percentage volume (within ranges) of the ink.

These documents are supposed to follow a standardized format, and also should disclose hazardous components and remediation steps in case of contact. See screen grab for HP Latex R-Series cyan ink. Also, with HP, the term 'Latex' does not refer to natural latex rubber, but is actually Synthetic Resin Co-Polymer.

In all cases, the 'base' of any ink is the carrier of the solid components, and is almost always > 50 percent of the ink. In the case of all HP Latex inks, water is the base/ carrier fluid - this is disclosed in the MDS.
 

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