 How we run our Anajet
I've been reading a lot of the posts about the difficulties involved with making money or getting a decent print from the Anajet printer by new owners or decorators who are new to direct to garment printing with an Epson based printer.
We own an Anajet FP-125 and have had our share of frustrations and successes. While I can't tell you how to start printing cash bonuses and instantly make money appear; I'm willing to share the steps we took and choices we made to get the machine to at least pay for its lease and supplies and some months, more than that. Others will have different experiences from me as there are a lot of variables but these are the things that work for us.
1. Maintainance - Clean or print; you will lose ink either way but you must do both at one time or another. The longer you leave between printing a shirt to keep the ink flowing through the lines and the system, more involved your next cleaning will be when something isn't right. While this is always true of any inkjet garment printer, the chances of ink causing equipment failure increase significantly when dealing with white ink. Avoid those risks by cleaning and printing more often.
With 50-80% humidity and temps around 85-100F in our workshop, we print at least 3 shirts semi-evenly through the 10 hour day or run 3 head cleanings and clean the capping station at the end of the day when using CMYK + 4 cleaning carts. Sometimes we miss a day and we're ok.
With white ink though, miss one day and there is a good chance we have to disconnect the lines and flush the white lines with cleaning fluid/distilled water. Then an overnight sitting of the cleaning fluid in the system and finally being able to print once we reload the white lines. All of which we have proven to ourselves that we can avoid if we just make sure to print a few shirts and keep things flowing.
2. RIP choice - If you like the colors coming out of EK Digital, stick with it. If you don't (we didn't like the oversaturation) we chose MultiRIP as our replacement software.
We had one vendor show us prints from two different direct to garment printers and the RIP used for the Epson based product output a print very similar to EK Digital. I can understand why some decorators would prefer the more "vivid" and "bright" effects for photo prints and multi-color prints. Our prints of the same source looked rather pale and "under-inked" in comparison
Yet when you compare the garments to the source file, it was clear that our MultiRIP printed garment was a much closer match to the file source. If your goal is to get as much visual pop out of your prints without extra work, I think EK Digital does that job just fine. If you need to keep colors more to the accurate side and can modify the files in Photoshop/PaintShop/CorelDraw it might be more beneficial to download the MultiRIP trial and see how it works for you. Our shop does a lot of contract printing so color matching is a regular issue, hence we chose MultiRIP.
3. Pretreatment - Sunnydayz wrote the definitive guide to managing the filibration issue and many have listed good starting points for how to apply pretreatment. Basically though, all of the information is just that, a starting point. Buy a case of youth black shirts start practicing/testing. Currently we apply pretreatment so that there is a fine layer at full strength (no dilution), dry with the press hovered for 30 secs at 330F and press with no paper for 30 secs 60-80 PSI. We like our results with these settings, but to get the best result in your environment, you will need to do your own print and wash tests.
The 2 -3 days of printing,testing, washing and the $150-200 you spend on shirts and supplies will do more for getting a return on your investment than trying to tweak your process as you print paid jobs. Reprints and delays not to mention the added stress means it just isn't worth it to do your testing on the customer's dime instead of investing less than 1/2 your estimated monthly lease.
4. Ink - Our Anajet shipped with Dupont Artistri inks rebranded and repackaged in sealed cartridges.
Those same inks are available from several vendors in bulk. The refillable carts are also available from at least 2 vendors DTGinks and EquipmentZone.
If you print a lot and make certain to always keep your inks from settling (even CMYK will settle if you let it sit too long) then looking into a refillable system might be worth the cost savings. You risk Anajet voiding your warranty if they find out and there is an increased chance of head/line clogs due to the ink's exposure to the air.
If you don't print in large volumes (read everyday, several shirts per run) you may find the added stability of degassed ink cartridges are worth the added cost.
In our experience, the cost savings of using refillable system are worth the added labor/attention if you have the volume.
Again, all the above are what has worked for us. This guide of sorts is really only definitive for our shop as your shop will have different issues and your customers will have different needs. I just wanted to share our experiences with things that aren't covered 100% in the User's Manual for people new to direct to garment printing. | 
