top "piece of crap printers" seem to be astarjet, micolor, and wit-color.
thought experiment
china (all of asia as well), india, and russia are covered in graphics. we think we like signs here in the USA. nope. no one plasters every square foot of space like the asian culture.
but, most of them are not using mimaki, roland, and mutoh.
so, here are tens of thousands of sign shops all with printers with fried boards, clogs, air leaks, total chaos. nothing's getting printed. just broken worthless piece of crap printers parked in the back room, long since written off as a bad purchase.
on the contrary,
tens and tens and tens of thousands of these machines are cranking out millions of square feet of media each year.
it's a frame, with a gantry, some tubes, a board, heaters, some firmware, a capping station, and print head, and some servos/steppers. it's not rocket science. printers could be one of the simplest industrial pieces of equipment out there. it's just a meme that only three major companies, all sharing basically the same design concept can actually comprehend such impossibly technical engineering feats. why else would desktop printers be almost free just to sell ink? because factories can bang them out like toasters. a big toaster isn't that much more complex than a small toaster.
I'm getting a 1.6m (63") ...
