Judy,
I always try to be as upfront as possible - even when it involves one of my products. So below is the list of pros / cons from running a hybrid printer since Dec. 2006. It is also going to depend on which printer you are going with. My preference is for the 4800 / 4880 printers. As for which ink is best, I have not really seen that much of a difference between either one in the colors. We made the profiles so that you get the maximum colors for each type of ink. MultiRIP does come with the built-in profiles for both SubliJet IQ and ArTainium inks.
Pros for Hybrid Printers in General
-Provides you the ability to invest in one better printer instead of two smaller, cheaper printers that require the use of bulk feed systems that require more maintenance.
- A hybrid allows you to only invest in 4 bags / cartridges of ink for dye sub and 4 bags / cartridges of heat transfer inks... instead of 8 bags / cartridges for two separate printers (total of 16 bags / cartridges)
- Takes up less space to have one hybrid printer compared to two printers (one running sublimation and one running heat transfer ink).
- When running with MultINK, you are able to print quality film positives for screen printing since the black ink has UV inhibitors in it.
Cons for Hybrid Printers
- All piezo printers (Epson is included) has software in the printer that is going to spit ink from all the channels into the spitting station / waste tank. If you print 90% from one side of the printer, you will notice that the other set of inks will start to go down as well. If you had the printer loaded with all 8 channels on the same ink, you will never notice that you are losing ink... even though you really are. This is just a negative when using any piezo printer.
- If you purchase two printers, you can have two jobs printing at the same time. Depending on which two printers you have, they might out produce one hybrid printer because the hybrid can only do one job at a time.
- When running a hybrid RIP, it requires that you have a computer with a little more processing speed as the files you are sending to your printer as significantly larger because the RIP sends better color information than a standard driver. You don't have to have the fastest computer, but you might not want to run several programs as it could slow down the RIP.
Feel free to ask any specific questions you have by MultiRIP or hybrid printers in general. We also have a very detailed FAQs page (
www.multirip.com/faqs.html) that we created. The concept was if the question was asked three times, it would be asked more and we should post a PDF or video with the answer.
Best wishes in what ever your decision is,
Mark
Hybajet Multilink for dye sub & cotton 
