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hawrai · April 18th, 2009

Hi,

While still trying to decide whether to go for Brother 541, I would like to ask owners of this printer, why they chose this over the Anajet? as the latter I am told prints onto dark garments also.

Thanks for your reply.

mrbigjack50 · April 19th, 2009

I had Anajet and now have Brother printer and Boy is it a treat to have Brother.

Ok here are reasons why Brother is better:

Printer is Faster than Anajet

Print from any software, File and Prints and great results everytime, compared to going into this aweful rip system Anajet has

Brother was made from ground up compared to Anajet

4 industrial print heads on Brother for each color compared to a $300 Epson printer head

Tells you ink cost of every Job

Maintenance is very minimal on Brother "which I Love"

Prints with black come out amazing, anajet made everything look cyan and you had to do alot of tweaking

Brother is a much more sturdy looking and impressive machine

All kind of platens for Brother and print area is larger

Everything is heavy duty on it and I just love it

Doing black shirts on Anajet is very time consuming, pricey and is not worth it at all believe me when I say that, I would pick my Brother over Anajet any day of week and I print 50 shirts a day with perfect results everytime

SPjames · April 19th, 2009

YA, Prints faster than any other printer, has had the most positive feedback out of any other printer out there, I have very very rarely heard of negative feedback on the brother!

skdave · April 19th, 2009

Just read the thousands of post on this forum and the answer will be clear to you.

DAGuide · April 19th, 2009

Although both of them can and will print on shirts, the internal components are very much different. I am not talking bad about any dtg printer that is made from an Epson printer - they have a lot of positive things (cheaper and more widely available parts, higher printing resolutions,...). If you have the budget for a Brother GT-541 and you only care to print on CMYK inks, then many people will tell you that the Brother is your best option. There are times when a Brother printer might not be best for your specific business model (i.e. doing traveling events, want to create your own ICC profile(s), need a wider print than 14" or a longer print than 16",...). But without knowing more specifics about your business plan, it is tough to provide you additional advice other than before making your decision - get out to see first-hand all the printers before dropping thousands of dollars. Don't settle for just having sample prints sent to you. Also, contact as many people that already have the printers you are considering via the forum and get their opinion of them. There is so much that is under-estimated with most dtg owners when they purchased their printer. So learn from them.

Best wishes in your research and decision!

Mark

hawrai · April 19th, 2009

Hi Mark

We will be opening our own small boutique in London, and want to sell our own t-shirts, print speed will not be too much of an issue, but would be great if we could get a machine which can print on black also. That's why I was wondering that since the Anajet prints on black, I would have thought it the better option, unless you guys know different.

stix · April 19th, 2009

Well I purchased a Brother because I rec'd a smoking deal. The printer was setting for months with the heads and wiper cartridge looking horrible. Once cleaned up the machine printed like new. If I were buying a new machine it would be under ths conditions that I fly out and receive training before I took possession at my location.

DAGuide · April 19th, 2009

Rai,

There are only a couple of things that you should be concerned with and the first one is that you used the word "small". You have to have either a separate space to do the pretreatment for white ink printing (usually in a different room) or have an automatic pretreatment machine (which takes up more space and runs around $4,500 in the U.S.). So I an not sure if space is going to be an issue or not for you. You don't want to do the pretreating right next to the printer without using an automatic pretreater. The overspray can do some serious damage to your printer.

The fact that you are selling retail, you are going to need to charge a premium for dark garment shirts. Not sure what the conversion rate is to the Pound / Euro, but I recommend retail shops to sell one-offs at $20 - $25 (US) each. Note sure if the market you are going to sell shirts to will want to pay this level of pricing. You are also going to have to make sure that you run a print a day or run the automatic head cleaning program (periodically pumps ink out of the print head into the waste tank to prevent clogs) to keep the print head working properly. Doing the cleanings can eat away at your profits and can be time consuming.

With white ink printing, you are going to have to pretreat the shirt. However, you don't necessarily want to pretreate the entire front and back of the shirts in advance. And pretreating one shirt at a time is not all that effective. Doing a dark garment one at a time will take you around 10 minutes (pre-press the shirt, pretreat the shirt, cure the pretreatment, print the shirt, cure the ink). Compare that to 1.5 minutes to do CMYK only (pre-press, print ink, cure ink). The amount of print time for a dark garment can run around 5 minutes compared to 45 - 60 seconds to print CMYK ink. As some above mentioned, you will spend a significantly more amount of time doing maintenance on a white ink printer than a CMYK. The key - time is money.

I would also not recommend getting a white ink printer unless you are going to receive some training on the method and maintenance. Take a good, honest look at who is going to be the operator of the printer. I tell most owners that they are not going to be at the shop all the time. So everyone that is going to be operating the printer needs to be trained on the printer. I don't recommend on relying on teenagers to run a white ink printer in most cases because of the level of difficult the multiple factors that you need to right to get a quality print, but have seen several run a CMYK printer. So you need to consider everyone that is going to run the printer and look at there skill on equipment & software.

Hope this gives you some things to think about. Best wishes,

Mark

hawrai · April 20th, 2009

Hi Mark,

Thanks for the detailed info. I personally would be operating the printer, the company selling the Anajet in UK have been very helpful, they will provide all training, repair and support, they also sell the Brother and have praised this machine highly. They did say the Brother is great quality but also said the Anajet is very good in the right hands, as long as you know how to look after it.

I have a few more questions on the pre treating...

Is this procedure safe (inhaling pre treated shirt fumes when curing / mist when applying etc) ?

Does the pre treating have to be done right before you print or can it be done day before? As we do have another room away from where the printer would be based. So we could pre treat in small bulk one day and bring to print the next.

Any particular brand other than Anajet you recommend for dark printing?

Thanks.

mrbigjack50 · April 20th, 2009

Pretreatment has some nasty stuff in it, so not best thing to be inhaling.
Actually better to do 24 hours before because pretreatment needs to dry before printing on it.
Anajet does have some sorta preteatment box that had a fan to let out fumes...

There are other machines which print on dark, but not sure which companies sell in UK

DAGuide · April 20th, 2009

Sean covered the most of it on pretreatment. Most of the people pretreat without a mask, but others do use one for safety purposes. You don't want to pretreat in a dusty or windy area as particles will get on the pretreatment and will be there for good. I would make some type of booth that would give you about 4 feet of clearance around the sides of the booth to protect from overspray. Most people put old cardboard boxes down on the floor so when the overspray hits it, you don't damage the floor / carpet.

Depending on how you cure the pretreatment, it can be done in advance or right before printing. Some people like to air dry the pretreatment. To do this takes up even more space and you have to pretreat the entire front or back - or both sides - of the shirts. This can be additional costs since a gallon of pretreatment runs around $80.00 (US). There are definitely pros and cons to doing the pretreatment each way. You just have to deteremine what works best for your business. Just make sure that you store the shirts flat (folding them can lead to the pretreatment breaking down some) and you don't get dust on them.

As for other printers, I know that DTG Digital has a distributor in the UK. I would not be shock if some of the European based dtg manufacturers (i.e. PolyPrint, Azon,...) also have representatives in the UK as well. Not sure if the M&R iDot has made it there already as well. You might want to contact Images Magazine (IMAGES - THE JOURNAL FOR TEXTILE SCREENPRINTING ,EMBROIDERY, PROMOTIONAL CLOTHING AND GARMENT DECORATION) and see if they have a list of companies that sell dtg printers. I think they have a trade show coming up in the near future as well that you might want to go to before making this investment.

Hope this info helps. Best wishes,

Mark

hawrai · April 20th, 2009

Thank you guys for the info, great forum !

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