Hi. I was given two large format printers, so the first thing I can tell you is that the ink is less than half the cost of what it would be in a smaller printer.
The guy that gave them to me used them to sublimate onto large polyester flags, for corporate use. He used to buy sublimation paper on 25 metre rolls from somewhere in Holland, but I'm sure than many others must sell them too.
I am sure that you are aware, that you can only sublimate onto products that have a high polyester content.
Hi. I was given two large format printers, so the first thing I can tell you is that the ink is less than half the cost of what it would be in a smaller printer.
The guy that gave them to me used them to sublimate onto large polyester flags, for corporate use. He used to buy sublimation paper on 25 metre rolls from somewhere in Holland, but I'm sure than many others must sell them too.
I am sure that you are aware, that you can only sublimate onto products that have a high polyester content.
We dye sub now - just moving into custom apparel for sporting industry and needing to print on rolled fabric.
I am talking to Sawgrass about a large format sublimation system. Specifically using an Epson 9880 wide format printer - 44".
I am also looking at various large format heat presses to deal with the output of this printer. Both flat and roller.
I should have some test samples using my own image files to evaluate next week.
Have you found a good entery level roller press? The key colors in our little niche we target that some competitiors have troubles with are reds and blacks. It seems that finding the right combination of ink and paper is critical.
I don't think there are any so called "entry level" roller/rotary presses. All I have found so far start around 15K and go up. It seems to me, at those kinds of prices, you have to be serious about what you want to do.
For fabric a roll press is the way to go. For ready made you need a flat bed. If you are doing lots of fabric get a roll press you are not limited to length. We use TextprintXP with our 9800 and a dual CMYK system. With the 9880 you can't use the dual CMYK feature and you will spend more on ink. To see samples of our work on TexprintXP and the dual CMYK ink setup check our website. When we print an image with a lot of black we press it about 10% longer.
We dye sub now - just moving into custom apparel for sporting industry and needing to print on rolled fabric.
If you will be doing full custom production and therefore cutting and sowing your garments, you might want to consider pre-cutting your fabric panels in stacks using a vertical cutter (jigsaw), this will allow you to reduce the labor cost and time involved with cutting the fabric. Once you have your panels cut you can use either a flat bed press (cheaper than the rotary models) or a rotary with a loading table (such as the Monti Antonio).
An epson 9800 will do the job if you are planning to use it for samples or small productions (10-20) units a day, otherwise you will need to look at some production units such as Mimaki or Mutoh. On those you can print about 60-70 complete cycling jerseys in 7 hours.
A Geo Knight flat bed press would be the most affordable production quality unit I would recomend. Since color is critical to you a good heat press with even temperature and pressure distribution is A MUST!
Also look at a good quality high release paper such as Beaver Texptint XP or JetTran HR. As for the ink on wide format printers you have a choice and from my experience US Sublimation and Manoukian are the best for quality and color.
Finally, fabric is very forgiving and when printing garments especially you don't need very high resolutions so you might want to use lower dpi settings on your printer(540dpi or 720dpi) in order to gain speed over the high resoltion settings that usually are very slow but dont give you any advantage when it comes to printing on most fabrics.
You mention that you are on a budget and in this case I would look at purchasing the best and largest heat pres I could buy and an epson 9800 (you need a rip to run it as a CMYKx2). Printer technology is evolving and new and cheaper printers come on the market every year, however the heat press you buy for keeps and if you buy well it will be an investment that stays with you for a long time!.
very timely post for me as I was just going to preferred vendors list to look for a 9880. We have a 60" roll press that I bought through a importer friend who deals with Asia daily. Currently we have a 9000 epson with ok results. Are you saying the 9800 is a better machine or just more cost effective than the 9880? My roll press will arrive Friday and am anxious to see the results. Approx. 6,000 plus all the other costs in importing. We make alot of flags but wanted to get into the cut and sew industry. thanks for the good info. Rick
9880, 9800 and 9000 are basically the same printer with 2 differences: the 9880 and 9800 use a single 8 channel (8colors) print head that can print up to 1440 dpi while the 9000 is a 7 color printer with the older 720 dpi heads.
The problem with the 9880 is that the chip system on it is hard to crack and good bulk ink systems are hard to find for it. On the 9800 the bulk ink solutions are more stable and proven while on the 9000 bulk ink solutions are not easy to find as the printer has been off the market for a while.
All those printers use light colors that are useless unless you print high resolution pictures on hard substrates, on the fabric there is no real advantage. The 9800 and 9880 can be set up as CMYKx2 but you need an additional software (a RIP that supports this set up on the printer) to do that.
To make a long story short, if your 9000 is set up properly will give you the same quality as the newer models although at slightly lower speeds.
Large Format Dye Sub 
