The answer to your original post lies within your ultimate objectives. Are you truly business oriented and seeking equipment to efficiently meet demand or are you a frustrated hobbyist/artist tech who gets off more on playing and tweaking both with the equipment and the graphic files?
ALL dtg (as just about any other business equipment) requires maintenance. Resign yourself to that first. The best equipment is designed to minimize the routine but by no means eliminate it. DTG is not a lawn mower that you can throw gas in every week, pull the cord, cut the grass and then shove it back in the garage for another week.
As to output quality, again, are you planning on operating a business or an art gallery? Are you planning to do business or play? "Quality" of a print is a subjective judgment. The business objective is to turn out appealing art products on apparel which appeal to and satisfy the buyer and do so in a profitable, consistent environment.
If you prefer to spend excessive design time choosing,playing with and tweaking a design until it meets someone else's "subjective" judgment, that may be fun, but not particularly profitable. Just remember that design/print contests are fun, yes, but they are not representative of day to day production and profitability.
For our operations, the Belquette Mod 1 meets all requirements of trouble free operation (given basic common sense maintenance), low unit operating costs and very high quality outputs.
Once you dial in on the equipment and feel comfortable with the hardware, do your due diligence on the company producing it. You will live with them a long time. That future relationship can either be mutually beneficial and yes, mutually profitable for both of you OR it can have devastating consequences on your business. Belquette meets that qualification for us. Good luck!
