Hi guys, sorry it took so long to reply to this post. This was one crazy week. We printed just under 700 shirts this week, mostly darks requiring white ink.
I understand printing onto dark garments is much more difficult than what we are used to with our GT541, but are training classes mandatory like other machines? What is the ease of use with this machine.
I don't know that classes are mandatory, but I would highly recommend a training class. Not only do you want to be shown in person how to properly pre-treat and press a shirt for white ink, you want to see the ins and outs of using the Rip software for multiple layers.
Now, the MOD1 outshines most other printers I looked at before deciding on it.
For one, the way Belquette designed the machine was for ease of use, and ease of maintenance. It really is a truly Modular system. By that, you can take the actual printer off of the Y and Z axis and replace it with a solvent printer. Or you can take the printer off and store it or do maintenance. It's nice that components are separated. As a user it is so nice to be able to just open the front cover, move the print head and spray the entire thing down with windex without worrying about getting critical components wet.
See my post here with some pics:
http://www.t-shirtforums.com/direct-garment-dtg-inkjet-printing/t78753-2.html
Secondly, I haven't seen an easier platen loading system that is on the MOD1. Combined with Rapid Auto 2nd Pass feature, this printer really is fire and forget. Set your platen on the bed, load, come back and it's done.
Some of the older style printers were not smart enough to know when the print was finished. Our kiosk has a green button to Auto Load the bed and begin the next pass. That works great if you are standing right there to prevent it from loading AFTER the 2nd pass. All that time really does add up.
Can any user give an estimate on how many prints (12" x 14") this machine can produce in an hour? Please include pretreating by hand. And average cost at that size?
It seems like most companies advertise the print engine theoretical print times, with us users never coming near that number. Belquette has managed to close the gap on down time by coming up with things like the Rapid 2nd pass (the printer reloads the platen after printing the last white pixel instead of fully ejecting it). Also making it simple to load your next shirt. If you have multiple platens staged and ready to go, your down time in between prints can be as little as 5 - 10 seconds vs something hard to load like the Kiosk which could be 30-45 seconds in between prints.
We recently printed a Wolfpack design which was 12.5 x 14.5. 1440x720 mode took 4 min 15 seconds where the 1440x1440 mode took right around 6 min.
Our Kiosks were taking right around 10 min for 1440x720.
Although 1440x720 was much faster and a great looking print the artwork we had to work with was kind of low resolution which I reworked a bit. Because of that, variations in pre-treat could cause some prints to look good and others to look just 'ok'. At 1440x1440 the print was much more forgiving and the results were amazing.
Finally, our GT541 has problems printing great purples and pinks, does this machine have a weakness printing any color? And are there any color changes between the first print and the 50th one?
Well, first our Kiosk has problems printing blues and grays. We do not like the Dupont color profiles in our Rip Software, we are still using the old R&H profiles from a few years back.
On the MOD, colors seem spot on. Obviously there is going to be a bit of a difference when comparing the image from a monitor vs a t-shirt, but the difference is usually lightness variations not terrible color shifts like we see on the Kiosk where blues like to print purple, and grays like to print blue.
Now, while printing with lots of white ink we did notice a bit of white-base degradation. After about 15 or so prints the white base would become less than perfect and eventually need a head clean. We found that we had the same problem on the Kiosks because they are ejecting so much white ink and the
fan in our shop was drying it on the print head eventually covering the nozzles. A simple head clean takes care of this. Once we identified this we removed the fan from that area and the problem is resolved. Like any inkjet, printing that many in a row it's not uncommon to have to do a normal head clean.
Power cleans and initial charges are not needed when printing or in the morning when preparing to print. The closed bag system just works.
Below are some pics - P.S. some of the white halos around the icons are not choke or registration problems. We had to use a 72dpi image from a power point file. I didn't have time to clean it up completely.
Printing the color layer
Wolfpack just printed
